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Poor shooting, second half dooms Butler

By Matt Fortuna
Special to NCAA.org

HOUSTON -- Brad Stevens was smiling outside the losing locker room of the national title game Monday night.

His team had just watched a once-turned-twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity come and go again, had just shot at a historically poor rate to see its championship dreams wither and die in a 53-41 loss to Connecticut.

But Brad Stevens was smiling.

The rare moment of joy on a night gone bad for Stevens was prompted by a question about his senior class, the one led by Matt Howard, whose postgame tears were outdone only by the sweat he poured into the Butler program over four years and two Final Four appearances.

At 6 a.m. each day, Stevens had said minutes earlier at the podium, Howard was in the gym, setting the standard for the rest of his teammates, living out The Butler Way, as it has become known with this second title-game appearance.

Years from now, Stevens continued, students and friends of the school will be telling stories about Howard, about their experiences with the Connersville, Ind., native who came to embody all that everyone adored about the threat from the Horizon League.

Earlier Monday, a New York Times blogger estimated Butler's odds of reaching this night two years in a row at roughly 7,500 to 1.

But with most of America watching for a potential chance at history Monday night, Howard and the Bulldogs dug themselves a hole not even the most destined of teams could escape. Shot after shot after shot clanked off the rim, which served as the final judge on basketball history, on Butler's attempt at crashing the elite party reserved for schools like Duke and UConn.

The harder Howard and his teammates tried, the uglier it got.

Butler was hanging around, down five with more than 13 minutes remaining and with Howard getting as open a look from the left side as he would get all night. The long layup bounced off the glass and ricocheted off the rim.

Out of a timeout after falling behind by 11 three minutes later, Howard challenged the Huskies' front-line and muscled up a shot that for once went unblocked. It sat on the rim and dropped off the front for another miss.

Finally, with his team down by 13 three minutes later, Howard found himself alone near the elbow beyond the 3-point arc, where he had made his only previous shot. The ball was half-way down the net before popping out and into the hands of UConn's Alex Oriakhi.

His head stuffed in a white towel in the locker room, his right knee bloodied, Howard had missed a dozen shots in all, finishing 1-for-13. Butler as a team made just three 2-point field goals the entire game and shot 12 of

64 overall, an 18.8-percent clip that will become the standard for title-game futility.

And this is where Stevens was reminded of the beauty of Butler's run, where he was able to allow himself a comfortable smile after trying to force an upbeat tone that was rejected like one of his players' shots Monday night.

"Hard for me to watch, and it's hard for me to talk about," Stevens said of his seniors going out like this, "but it's the best part of the story."

Could a substitution here or there have changed things for Butler? Perhaps, though the bench accounted for six of those 64 misses and not one of those

12 makes.

Instead, Stevens was again forced to walk into a defeated locker room, this one as raw as any he had ever seen.

"It's a real locker room when the freshmen are crying, because they've got three years left," he said. "The freshmen and sophomores always think they're gonna be back, but they recognize the value of their teammates and what they have given to the program."

They recognized it last year, when Gordon Hayward jumped to the NBA after his halfcourt heave against Duke fell oh-so close to changing the landscape of the sport as it is currently known.

And they recognized it this year, with Howard and Shawn Vanzant, who had no picnic himself during a 2-for-10 night from the field.

"A lot of people think that when a school like Butler does well it's just because you have one or two great players," sophomore Andrew Smith said in front of his locker. "Gordon and Willie [Veasley] were great players last year and it was hard to lose them. But we showed that with a great program and great leadership that we can come back and do it again.

"And we feel like we have a good group of guys coming back next year, and who knows what we can do?"

Stevens knows, and now everyone else does too. That's why Brad Stevens was smiling.

Matt Fortuna is a senior in the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State University