Wichita — Mass Street nearly ended up a footnote in a Cinderella story. Instead, its opponent We Are D3 became one in Keith Langford’s story.
The 39-year-old former Kansas guard, who had positioned The Basketball Tournament as his swan song to professional basketball, willed the KU alumni team to victory in the second half after they fell behind by as many as 12 points against a squad composed of former NCAA Division III players.
Langford showed the inside-outside scoring that has made him a force to be reckoned with during his lengthy overseas career, tallying 13 points in the second half to help Mass Street tie the game at 62 entering TBT’s signature Elam Ending.
Thomas Robinson took over from there, scoring twice in close, then putting back a Mario Little missed free throw, allowing Mass Street to hit the winning number for a 70-67 victory.
“I was confident in him, he got a violation two times, so I knew one of these was going to work,” Little said.
Robinson finished the game with a 21-point, 15-rebound double-double on 10-for-13 shooting against an undersized D3 squad. Little, who had been key to the Mass Street offense all night with 17 points, missed a pair of free throws that could have won the game if he got both.
“My blood boils at those times,” Little said. “So I missed the two free throws, but what was going through my head — He got the tip-in, next game.”
Early on, Mass Street had a hard time even getting Robinson the ball. With point guard Tyshawn Taylor injured, ball movement, particularly in transition, ended up being much more of a strength for D3. The significantly younger team — with its players on average 7.6 years younger than its opponents’ — repeatedly found open spots beyond the arc on the run, helping set up post player Adam Fravert (18 points, 4-for-9 from deep).
Perhaps Fravert’s most crucial connection came in the dying moments of the third quarter, when he sank a corner 3 in the halfcourt set to halt a Mass Street rally driven by Robinson.
Mass Street had experienced a brief surge of momentum early in the second half following a Lagerald Vick 3 for his first points of the game, a vicious Langford block and a three-point play for Langford at the other end. But Fravert struck back, Marcus Azor added a dunk in transition and then Ty Nichols sank a floater to boost the lead back to 12 points at 48-36, equaling the largest margin of the game at that point.
Nichols finished with 15 points, and three other D3 players were in double digits.
After Brandon Rush, a late addition to the Mass Street roster, snagged a cross-court pass and sank a corner 3 to bring the pro-Kansas crowd back into it, Nichols responded immediately with a stepback 3 through a foul. He missed the chance at a four-point play, and Mass Street’s momentum persisted this time, culminating in a Robinson post layup to narrow the score to 53-50 in the final minutes of the third quarter.
But after a long review and a sequence of fouls, Fravert hit his dagger to offset Mass Street’s fleeting progress.
It was only when Langford caught fire that the team sustained its production for any significant stretch. And part of that came, he said, because he switched his shoes.
“I said, if I’m going to go out and retire, it’s my last game, I’m going to go out doing what I always do, so changed the shoes,” he said.
Of course, he also had to settle into the pace of the game, given that he’s struggled in recent years with an Achilles tendinopathy that ground his overseas career to a halt.
“I think Marcus (Morris, the head coach) did a fantastic job (with) the substitution patterns,” Langford said. “… I knew I would get opportunities and I was finding the spots on the floor and just kind of computing the game, so I knew where it would kind of come in the second half.”
Mass Street will play the Show Me Squad, a Missouri alumni team, on Saturday. D3 fell to 0-5 all-time in TBT, despite another close call.
Morris and Little noted postgame that Mass Street has only been able to practice together three times, and could also get back some of its absent players, like Taylor, by Saturday.
“We haven’t had a lot of time together,” Morris said. “We talked about getting past this first game so we could be able to practice a little bit more, be able to learn each other.”
Mark Kuhlmann/TBT
