LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – The lights never went out in Freedom Hall on Saturday — but nobody would’ve been surprised if they had.
The two teams fighting for the ASUN regular-season championship had to come close to shooting them out. Liberty had been listening all season to talk about this ASUN upstart, NCAA Division I newcomer Bellarmine. Worse than that, the Flames had been looking up at the Knights in the league standings for the second half of the season.
On Saturday, the Liberty Flames lived up to their name, torching the Freedom Hall nets for 15 3-pointers (out of 25 attempts) to shoot down Bellarmine’s bid at an improbable regular-season conference title in its first season of Division I membership.
Score it Liberty 94, Bellarmine 78. The host Knights trailed by 20 but scratched their way back to an 8-point deficit in the final minutes. But when they needed 3-pointers the most, the Knights couldn’t find them.
Liberty’s Darius McGhee, a 5-foot, 9-inch junior averaging 14.8 points per game and shooting 40% from beyond the arc coming in, made 8 of 11 3-pointers and scored 34 points. Bellarmine had no answer.
"We knew coming in, if he had a big night, we were in trouble," Bellarmine coach Scott Davenport said. "And he scored 34. So ... Look, those were two really good basketball teams, two really good programs. It was a high-level game. ... Their backcourt quickness caused us problems we haven’t seen. Give them credit. The atmosphere was amazing. That’s college basketball. Amazing. One team shoots 57, one team shoots 62. That’s really good college basketball. And don’t say it’s because of the defense, because both teams were fighting with everything they had on defense."
There was no quit. I’ve seen more than a few games this season when a team got hot like Liberty did on Saturday — shooting 72% in the first half, in fact — and the opponent just fade away. That was never in danger of happening with Bellarmine.
The Knights kept executing offensively — often trading 2 for 3 — and ratcheted up their defensive pressure to try to boost the tempo and get more possessions. Liberty would have no part of it. Each team had 67 possessions. An extraordinarily low number for the number of points produced.
"I’d like to know how many games at this point in the season the teams shoot 63% and 57%," Davenport said.
What was it like coaching against a team that hot?
"It’s not fun," Davenport said. "They made some off the bounce. They made some off the catch. Two 4-point plays. But we knew what they were capable of. They went 16 for 33 (from 3) on Tuesday."
Normally, there would be another game against Liberty on Sunday. But because Freedom Hall had a show on Friday night, the ASUN decided to just play one game for all the regular-season marbles. Bellarmine played well, but Liberty earned its championship.
A lot of teams don’t shoot 62% from 3 in pregame warmups, let alone against live competition.
Bellarmine got 20 points from Pedro Bradshaw, 17 from Dylan Penn and 16 from C.J. Fleming. The Knights outscored Liberty in the paint, off turnovers and on the fast break.
"But you can’t overcome 15 of 25 (from 3-point range)," Davenport said. Bellarmine went just 3 of 11.
Now, the Knights turn their attention to the ASUN Tournament next week in Jacksonville, Florida. It was Senior Day, but seniors Fleming and Ethan Claycomb are coming back next season, so the festivities were brief.
Bellarmine ends its first Division I regular season with a record of 13-6 and 10-3 in the conference. And a chance to do more.
More than that, even against an offensive onslaught, they didn’t quit, they kept fighting, they gave themselves a chance late.
The game’s enduring image for me — Liberty making another shot, and the Bellarmine body language not changing. The Knights grabbed the ball out of the net, sprinted it up the court and went right back on the attack. Every. Time.
"I’m the luckiest guy in the world to coach this team. Not one thing has changed," Davenport said. "If we’d won that game, that whole locker room is ecstatic. This whole place is. If we’d won, how many texts do you think I’d get this afternoon? That doesn’t effect how I feel about this team. Just because they won or lost a game. No. I’m with them every day. We had guys at Knights Hall this morning just after 7 o'clock getting shots up. Our pregame meal was at 8:30 a.m. We had guys in there. No. I don’t feel any different about them. I’ll go to battle for them, way beyond this.”
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