Heartbreak Hotel: Stanford buzzer beater bounces ASU from Pac-12 Tournament

LAS VEGAS — ASU basketball’s hopes and dreams of a 2022 Pac-12 Tournament title are officially dead. The Sun Devils blew a 17-point lead and fell 71-70 to the Stanford Cardinal on James Keefe’s last-second jumper at T-Mobile Arena on Tuesday.

Coach Bobby Hurley’s team led by 14 points with a tad more than three minutes to play in the first-round matchup. Despite the double-digit lead, the Sun Devils pulled a Vegas magic trick and disappeared when it mattered most.  

“I think we were ready to play, and we played very well,” Hurley said. “And we made shots, and I thought we guarded well for really 37 minutes. We played really good basketball. We just didn’t –— we were a total mess for the last three minutes, and everyone would admit that if you went and asked anybody in our locker room about that.”

With three minutes and one second to play in the game, Sun Devil fans were on top of the world. Their team held a double-digit lead against a rather lackluster opponent in the first-round of a conference tournament. 

Graduate student Kimani Lawrence had a slam dunk for the ages sending the T-Mobile Arena crowd into a frenzy of cheers. Lawrence drew a foul on the play before an eventual television timeout. 

Smiles littered the ASU bench as the team stood three minutes and change from a stamp on what was expected to be the first of many days for the Sun Devils in Sin City. 

“We lost focus after Kimani got that big dunk,” sophomore guard Jay Heath said. “And we just never bounced back from that, missing free throws, turning it over, wasn’t rebounding, and ended up losing the game.”

The Lawrence slam was ASU’s final field goal of the game. It put a bitter bow on Lawrence’s tenure as a Sun Devil. 

“We just started playing the score, which has been unusual for us the last couple games,” Lawrence said. “Just a learning lesson for the guys coming back next year. As a senior leader, got to lead a little better. Help us stay together on court. I didn’t.”

The Sun Devils’ energy appeared to distract their focus in the remaining minutes of the game. Stanford went on a 16-1 run to close out the game on a turnaround jumper that sank at the buzzer.

ASU fans, players and coaches left in stunned silence, their excitement evaporating into emptiness. 

“They had possessions where they had three offensive rebounds,” Hurley said. “They missed two threes and then they made the third. We were doing things very uncharacteristic of what we’ve been doing the last few weeks, and you pay for it.”

It’s a price the Sun Devils will pay for months. The constant thought of what could have been if the final Stanford shot didn’t take a second bounce? Could this have been the Hurley team to finally show the conference they were for real?

ASU fans will never know. Even so, in a season strung together by hopeful wins and grueling stretches, a glimmer of hope again rises from the blown lead in Sin City.

Hurley’s team is expected to return four of the team’s five starters, alongside two role player freshmen. That doesn’t even include the possibility of sophomore forward Marcus Bagley coming back for another year or the incoming class. 

Nevertheless, the future is months away. In the meantime, as much as those in Tempe want to forget what took place in Las Vegas on March 9, 2022, Hurley said this loss will sit with him for a while. 

“You’ll always, in the back of your mind, think about, like, the ‘what ifs’, what if we would have had one less turnover, got one more stop, got one more rebound, we would have made one more free throw,” Hurley said. “That’s just not going to change anything.”

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