NCAA Tournament: Minnesota flunks assignment against Abrams, loses to Texas

Minnesota vs Texas

 
Everyone in the arena knew it. The Minnesota Golden Gophers knew it. Tubby Smith, owner of a 13-1 record in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, definitely knew it, too.
 
It didn't matter.
 
Despite the burden of being Minnesota's marked man, Texas sniper A.J. Abrams got free anyway and drowned Tubby's team in a tidal wave of treys. Abrams, one of the premier long-distance shooters in all of college basketball, buried the Golden Gophers with a barrage of 3-point shots midway through the second half, carrying the Longhorns to a 76-62 win in Greensboro Coliseum. The victory puts the seventh-seeded Horns into Saturday's second round against the winner of the Duke-Binghamton game. Minnesota's successful season ends at 22-11.
 
The Gophers' youth was exposed against a veteran Big 12 opponent. The men of Minneapolis knew they had to lock down Abrams, a shooter with parking lot range and a quick release. Yet, they still couldn't do the job, and suffered the consequences as a result.
   
After a moderately successful first half in which Abrams hit only three 3-point shots, the Gophers--solid on offense and entirely competitive for most of the evening--trailed by only three points, at 47-44, with 13:30 remaining in regulation time. With the U of M's meal ticket scorer, Lawrence Westbrook, having scored 17 of his 19 points to keep Minnesota close, the 10th-seeded Gophers had to like their chances down the stretch if they could simply maintain contact with the Longhorns.
 
Unfortunately for Tubby, his first-round NCAA mojo wouldn't last. The Gopher coach is now 13-2 in the opening act of the Big Dance, and it's all because his defense lost the plot... and Abrams... in the North Carolina night. This game rapidly slipped away from Minnesota in a mere two minutes and 10 seconds, and Abrams was the one who pumped the bullets into the Gophers' bracket.
 
With 13:11 left, Abrams--who had already knocked down a triple a few minutes earlier--nailed his fifth 3-pointer of the night to bump UT's 47-44 lead to 50-44. Minnesota needed to use that moment as a learning experience, and smother Abrams the rest of the way, but the exact opposite happened instead. On Texas's next three possessions, Abrams continued to shake free from Gopher defenders. Sometimes, he shot over an equally tall man, instead of a long-armed Gopher with a bigger wingspan. On other occasions, he found an open spot on the floor in transition. Regardless of the circumstances, the bottom line is that Abrams hit the bottom of the well: He got free, and then drilled a three. A bim-bang-boom sequence of Abrams threes, the equivalent of four devastating jabs thrown in succession, all hit their target and sent the glazed-eye Gophers tumbling to the canvas. When Abrams hit his eighth 3-pointer of the night with 11:01 remaining--his fourth long-ball bulls-eye in just over two minutes--Texas had a 59-44 stranglehold on the proceedings, and the final 11 minutes were just a matter of playing out the string.

Minnesota had a defensive assignment, but Tubby Smith--a highly-credentialed teacher of defense--watched his students flunk in the second half of this tussle with Texas. The Gophers put together a very successful 2009, but when the time came to put on their Dancing shoes in America's favorite tournament, Minnesota found itself flat-footed in the face of a lethal Longhorn shooter.
 
The Gophers figure to have a bright future. If they learn from their encounter with A.J. Abrams, they'll ensure that the biggest games of 2010 won't slip away the way this one did in Greensboro.

 

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