Lucky or not, Morrison can plain shoot it
SEATTLE – Twelve seconds to go and his team a point down, he fetched the ball from teammate J.P. Batista 85 feet from the basket and dribbled up court, accepting once again the duty of destiny.
Game.
First, he needed to shed his Oklahoma State shadow, Marcus Dove, which he did with the aid of a solid screen by Batista. The Cowboys’ David Monds picked up the chase and Dove made up the lost ground with a single long stride and then both flew at him. So as he elevated, he leaned away from the target and toward the stands. Not just a tough shot over two defenders, and not just a long one – a 3-pointer – but a fadeaway at that.
Set.
The ball took flight from his fingertips and the first instinct was to call it off the mark, long. Then the arc softened slightly and the rotation slowed, and the ridiculous became real: He was banking it off the glass.
Adam.
Let’s call it good and just give Adam Morrison college basketball’s player of the year award right now. Heck, give him the Heisman, too – the defense he had to deal with Saturday against Oklahoma State was nastier than anything Reggie Bush had to run through this season for USC.
Yes, it’s only December and three months of auditions remain. Sure, Duke sharpshooter J.J. Redick hung 41 on No. 2 Texas on Saturday afternoon in an incredible, demoralizing display of long-distance shooting and he is the marquee player on the nation’s top-ranked team.
Forty-one. Big deal.
Morrison has already bettered that not once but twice, against Michigan State and Washington – both Top 25 teams. On Saturday, he merely squeezed off 25 against pressure that was part machete-and-mace, part Sharks-and-Jets. And in the wake of having missed a game-winner against the Huskies in this city six days before, he tried again from roughly the same spot – only this time with the degree of difficulty amped up considerably.
Off the glass for 3, over two defenders, with 2.5 seconds to play.
Game. Set. Adam.
“Was it lucky?” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few. “Yeah. But you know what? That kid makes shots. That’s what he does. And he does it better than anybody in the country.”
Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton wasn’t inclined to disagree.
“He does such a good job of moving without the basketball – he’s a throwback to the way players used to be,” said Sutton. “You don’t find guys today who move without the ball as well as he does.
“He’s as good a perimeter player as there is in the country. There may be centers who are better players, but he’s terrific.”
Terrific and now very much battled tested, if you will. Never have the points come tougher for Morrison and the Gonzaga Bulldogs than they did in Saturday’s Battle in Seattle, a 64-62 victory over Sutton’s Cowboys, who aren’t the same guys who reached the Sweet 16 a year ago but whose athleticism and grit are all that.
Here’s an example. After a 3-pointer by Pierre Marie Altidor-Cespedes in the first half, the Zags went 16 minutes without a field goal out of some sort of set – just free throws and three put-backs. Given what the Zags usually get out of their offensive calls, that may be a school record.
“Every time I put the ball on the floor, there were four guys collapsing,” Morrison said. “They play defense so well as a team. But it shows how well my teammates responded down the stretch because we got some big buckets.”
True enough. The Zags don’t win without two toughies willed in by Batista, or the nervy drive by freshman Jeremy Pargo who was mostly tied in knots by OSU’s pressure all day, or an 18-footer by David Pendergraft when the Cowboys were threatening to sneak away for good. Likewise, the stops GU got from its 2-3 zone in the last 10 minutes were telling.
But just as clearly, the two biggest buckets, the stage and the wonder of 13,644 witnesses, belonged to Morrison.
Forget the game-winner for the moment. The 3-pointer he drilled with 2:42 left to pull the Zags within a point was a thing of beauty – both for the textbook double-screen by Batista and Pendergraft that chipped off Dove and for the execution of the shooter. Sutton had a splendid Hee-Haw explanation of how it unfolded.
“We call it piggyback, when they set a screen along the baseline and you stick your nose up a guy’s fanny and follow him, caboose him,” Sutton said, “and if you try to cut through so many times you get knocked off, and that’s what happened.”
Still, it was a bold stroke – the Zags desperate for a “hump” shot to move the game out of its basket-for-basket rhythm, to get it to a place where they might not need a 3 to win.
“It lifted our team and my confidence up a little bit,” Morrison said. “It’s almost like a dunk where you get the crowd going and change the game.”
And, of course, nothing changed it so much as his last shot.
“I wasn’t surprised (it went in),” Morrison said to a group of skeptics. “If you look at the tape when I made it, I was just – I knew I was going to make it. The bank, I was on that side – I’ve shot those millions of times by myself growing up, in practice, coming off screens and shooting fadeaways, joking around by myself. Not that I bank it every time, but I had the angle.”
Doubt that he really meant to? Don’t.
He is what he is – the best shot-maker in college basketball. Redick is a 3-point machine who can take over a game, but no one changes a game like Morrison with a bigger variety of offensive moves – slides and reverse pivots and arching twisters with defenders draped all over him. No player elicits such a crowd reaction – the frustration of Huskies fans as he made shot after improbable shot was audible. And then, after making just two of his previous 13 3-pointers, he never hesitated in launching the two that did in OSU.
“It’s Adam’s world,” Few shrugged, recounting the last play. “He has the option to take the guy one on one, and if the guy backs off he can shoot the 3. He needs to make a read. And he’s got J.P. rolling across if they want to do a two-man game. It’s those options. But it usually doesn’t get much farther than Option A with him.
“But that’s a good thing.”
Good? It’s game, set, Adam.