Wild win: Winthrop’s 3-OT victory over Gardner-Webb keeps Eagles perfect in Big South
Gardner-Webb’s Jose Perez thought it was over.
Perez, who had 30 points at the time, untucked his uniform. His team, the Runnin’ Bulldogs, led 80-74 with 18 seconds left in the Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill on Saturday night. Clusters of fans were walking toward the exits. Some had already left.
Perez walked over to the scorer’s table, sweat dripping off his face, and nodded: “I had to break out one game! I had to break out one game!”
It was over, right? It had to have been.
Two overtime periods, a few more shots Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey dubbed “heroic” and a final scoreboard that beamed “99-95” in the home team’s favor later — and the crowd on hand learned that it, in fact, was not over.
“We made big plays,” senior Kyle Zunic said postgame, shaking his head and smiling in disbelief. “It showed in the games we played in the non-conference schedule. We made some huge plays in those games.
“And it led to this moment, you know?”
Remembering Winthrop’s game-changing plays
After a missed free throw, Chandler Vaudrin sprinted the ball up the court. The score was 80-74, as aforementioned, in the first overtime.
After an Eagle miss and an Eagle offensive rebound and a few passes, Vaudrin chucked up a three from what seemed like Lancaster County. On his way down, he got bumped.
“I know I swung it to Mike (Anumba), and Mike swung it to Chan,” Winthrop’s Hunter Hale said postgame. “I didn’t really see anything. I was just doing my job and went to go crash.”
The shot swished through. And-one — 80-77, Gardner-Webb, with the chance for one more.
“And I was like, ‘Wow. We’re only down three now,’” Hale said. “Four seconds left. I was asking the sideline, our coaches, whether we should miss on purpose, or if we should make it and just foul, and they were telling us to make it.”
He then smirked: “We didn’t make it.”
Vaudrin missed the free throw, yes. But enter Chase Claxton, who jarred loose the rebound, which Hale eventually sprinted down. Hale then dribbled to the corner for a three, and — off-balance and contested — heaved a shot that probably would’ve graded in the single digits if individual shots were charted by KenPom.
That one, somehow, swished through, too — 80-80. On to double OT.
“My whole life I have been working on those types of shots, believe it or not,” Hale said. “When I’m in the gym, sometimes I run from corner to corner, spinning it out and trying to catch my balance and shooting off one foot, off balance, when I’m not shooting from the gun. I work on those shots.”
Vaudrin later confirmed: “Like, he does that in practice and gets yelled at for shooting it.”
Winthrop and Gardner-Webb split the lead time-wise for much of the second overtime period. The largest lead in the period, in fact, was at the very end, with nine seconds left.
Flash-forward to that moment: Perez, now with 33 points, was at the line, his team up one, 86-85. After hitting the layup to send the game into its original overtime — the time expiring with the ball hanging on the rim — it seemed fitting that he would make the final mark in this game’s story. He hit both free throws. 88-85, Gardner-Webb.
On the ensuing possession, Vaudrin somehow found the ball again. This time, from Chester County, he pulled up with two defenders flying at him.
“It just got late in the shot clock, and we didn’t really have much,” Vaudrin said. “I was on the right wing. They had a high ball screen and it was (Josh Ferguson), and I kind of just pulled up. I think the defender was a little bit off because he was feeling the screen a little bit...
“And I shot it. I knew it was on line. I just didn’t know if it was going to be long or short.”
It clanked off the backboard and nestled into the basket.
Another Bulldog heave from halfcourt was off the mark — 88-88. Triple overtime.
There were more big shots, before and after. There were other key free throw misses from both teams. There were more moments when Perez, who more or less bent the game to his will for over 50 minutes, agitated the exhausted crowd — flexing his muscles and screaming.
But the decisive moment came four minutes and 59 seconds later — literally to the game’s last second — when Kyle Zunic drained the free throw in triple overtime to seal the game with one second remaining, 99-95. Winthrop won.
Winthrop (10-7, 4-0 Big South) extended its winning streak to six. Gardner-Webb fell to 5-11, 1-3 in the Big South.
“I feel like it’s going to be one of those games where we’ll look back and be like, ‘I don’t know how we won, or what we did,’” Vaudrin later said.
“But we did win.”
Notable: DJ Burns, Josh Ferguson come up big
The three players that changed the game’s trajectory most have already been mentioned:
Vaudrin hit a pair of shots that gave the Eagles life. He played 48 minutes (a team high), and recorded 24 points, five assists and eight rebounds. Hale, the team’s leading scorer with 25 points, hit the shot that ultimately forced the first overtime. He added four assists and seven rebounds. And Zunic, who finished with six points in 21 total minutes, hit the decisive free throw.
But several other individuals affected this game — a contest which, by vice of turnovers and missed charge opportunities and more, saw Winthrop play without the lead for much of regulation.
One of the influencers was redshirt freshman DJ Burns. The big man, with six minutes left in the second half, hit three field goals in a row and brought the crowd to its feet in a crucial stretch.
“I told DJ, once he got to the locker room, I said, ‘The run that he went on really ignited us to getting back where we needed to be back in the game,’” Hale said of the big man. “He had some big, big free throws, big layups for us.”
Burns finished with 14 points and three rebounds.
Coach Kelsey said Ferguson logged important minutes — 43 of them — too. The senior forward finished with eight points and a team-high 14 rebounds.
“I thought Josh Ferguson was great in the last overtime,” Kelsey said. “He didn’t have his strongest game up until that point. But he was really big, played like a senior in that last five minute clip.”
Quotable: ‘Hampton’
Hale on if his team lost any hope at the end of first OT: “I feel like, at the end of the day, we’re trained for the moments. Although it seemed like it was over, it never crossed my mind that the game was over, honestly. I knew if they missed a free throw, we had a chance if we could come down and hit a three. I never thought the game was over...
“I feel like it’s just belief in what we have going on here.”
Vaudrin on if he didn’t believe his team would win at any point: “I know it’s cliché to say, but I didn’t feel like we were out of the game, as weird as that is to say. Because sometimes, maybe they get a rebound and we have to foul, and it’s like, ‘Dang.’ It’s setting in that we lost. But truthfully, when he missed that free throw, I didn’t have that.”
Kelsey on taking this win in the context of the broader season: “Hampton. Hampton. Hampton. Tonight, I’ll go home... But we turn the page, man, and we go to the next one.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 10:01 PM.
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