Originally Posted by
Turk
I watched the game again (woo hoo!) My belief is that 3.6 seconds is too much time for the intentional miss. A faster dribbler than Hayward could have gotten the ball well into the Duke side of the court for an even closer look.
IMHO, trying to make the 2nd shot and going up by 3 gives Duke a couple of extra advantages in this specific situation. Butler gets a max of 4 seconds to set up and inbound, which is the biggest risk. But they have no timeouts, and meanwhile Duke gets to set up too. Zoubs covers the inbounder, which is good for Duke even given the fact Butler could run the baseline if they wanted. If Butler inbounds in the backcourt to someone like Mack who pushes it up with the dribble, Duke has the option to trap and foul intelligently. I would be OK with a foul here, since Duke owned the defensive glass in the 2nd half and should collect Butler's own intentional miss if they make the 1st. If Butler goes for a halfcourt pass or longer, I like Duke's chances to intercept or deflect. None of the Butler players were so dominant they could create their own 3 off a one-on-one move when the D knows it's their only option.
But suppose Butler somehow manages to make a 3 at the buzzer. While Z and Lance have 4 fouls, don't forget both Howard The Hammer and Joliet Jukes also had 4 fouls for Butler, so they are at risk too. And the refs were pretty much letting them play. My sense of the game (from my living room) was that Duke would have been fine in OT, although clearly no Duke fan would have wanted to find out.
So given all that, it seems to me trying to make the 2nd free throw can only gain. If it's an unintentional miss, that scenario should play out the exact same way as it did. One could make the case that the intentional miss had an element of surprise (it surprised Clark Kellogg), but since Zoubs is not a good foul shooter, the surprise should be fairly small...
Credit Butler for setting up such a clear and controlled look at the basket by their best player. I remember watching the Bulter / Syracuse game when the Orange had a 4 point lead with less than 3 mins and thinking to myself, "Well, Butler, congrats on a nice run - you did yourself proud" and then later "wow - Syracuse completely self-destructed yet again..." I think that assessment is wrong in hindsight.
Probabilities will only take you so far (of course you can't ignore them). But every situation is different - each team's strengths and weaknesses and how they match up against an opponent means that there is no right answer...