CRAWFORD | Fru flawless, defense delivers late as Louisville edges Wake, 88-80

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — This one had the makings of a vacation. A postcard win. A 15-point second-half lead, an offense smoother than a bourbon neat, and Wake Forest’s Demon Deacons politely falling behind like Southern gentlemen in church pews.

Then the game got a little tipsy, and so did Louisville’s defense

Louisville, which had been scoring like it was playing H-O-R-S-E, suddenly couldn’t stop Wake Forest from treating the paint like it had no cover charge. The Cards gave up 46 second-half points and watched its lead turn into an 80-80 tie with 4:44 left.

Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford

Then, Louisville found its defensive keys just in time.

Six straight stops. Zero Wake Forest points the rest of the way. One very large exhale for the visitors, who left Winston-Salem with an 88-80 win and, perhaps, a reminder that defense is still part of the game.

Credit Sananda Fru, who had two blocked shots in the last 1:37 and finished with team highs of 17 points (on 7-for-7 shooting) and six rebounds.

"We didn't play our best defensively, for sure," Louisville coach Pat Kelsey told Paul Rogers in his postgame radio interview. "There were a lot of things from a rebounding standpoint that we need to improve. ... But we flipped a switch, got big stops, and that is growth."

Louisville’s offense looked like a Bob Ross painting: calm, balanced, and surprisingly colorful.

The Cardinals shot 53 percent from the field, made 10 of 25 from beyond the arc, and hit 24 of 31 free throws. They scored 1.31 points per possession, which in any language means “bring oxygen.” Wake Forest, which lost its fifth straight, wasn’t far behind at 1.18, but in a game of “last laugh wins,” Louisville got the punchline.

J’Vonne Hadley, playing on a still-tender frame after a hard fall in practice, delivered 15. His participation was a game-time decision. It was a good one. He opened the game with a corner three and a layup and came back in the second half to drop six more, pushing Louisville to its biggest lead of the afternoon, 54-39 with 15:56 left.

But Wake Forest answered with a series of jabs — three-pointers from Omaha Biliew, layups from Juke Harris, who finished with 25 and 11 rebounds — and gradually the crowd remembered how to cheer.

With 5:19 to play, Harris tied the game with an and-one. From there? Brick. Brick. Brick.

Louisville kept leaving the door open: a contested three from Mikel Brown Jr., a timeout, and then a pass to nobody in the left corner.

Still, Brown hit 7-of-9 free throws, including two to extend the lead to 87-80 with 25 seconds left. Fru blocked another three. Hadley secured another rebound. Khani Rooths blocked a shot. Ryan Conwell, who hit a pair of big second-half threes, chipped in 11 points.

"If people are really going to key on one guy, our guys willingness to hit singles and share the ball really make us hard to guard," Kelsey told Rogers.

Wake Forest scored its final field goal with 5:19 left. After that, it missed 11 straight shots, three of them blocked.

Louisville now has four Quad 1 wins, and with four more Quad 1 games in its next five, it needed this one like a fish needs water. It got it, eventually. The Cardinals won a third straight game for the first time since Thanksgiving.

Six players reached double figures. Rooths had 13, Isaac McKneely had 11 and Brown finished with 12.

Style points aren’t mandatory in February. Just wins. And on this day, that’s exactly what Louisville got.

Next up for the Cardinals is a visit from N.C. State on Monday, a 7 p.m. tipoff at the KFC Yum! Center.