Heartbreak for Princeton as shot to beat Notre Dame misses in NCAA tournament
BUFFALO — Devin Cannady had taken that shot - in his head - hundreds of times. In his dreams, it never missed. And it felt good when it left his hands. If it goes, he’s going to beat the team he grew up hoping to play for, the one he’d dreamed of taking just this sort of shot for.
But it clanged off the rim. And just like that, fifth-seeded Notre Dame tacked on a free throw and survived, 60-58, in a first-round NCAA tournament victory against Cannady’s 12th-seed Princeton Tigers, who hadn’t tasted defeat since before Christmas.
“I didn’t think about a March Madness moment,” Cannady told a phalanx of reporters surrounding his locker afterward. “It was a good look. It’s a shot I’ve taken before. But the ball didn’t fall like I wanted it to.”
BOX SCORE: Notre Dame 60, Princeton 58
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He looked emotionally drained. But the sophomore stood there and answered every question, including the one about if he’d long dreamed of taking the game-winner in an NCAA tournament barnburner.
“Yeah,” he said with a nod of his head. “That’s why you practice. That’s why you put the hours in the gym. That’s why it hurts that much more seeing it not fall.”
Notre Dame had an 11-point lead in the second half and nearly let it all slip away. The Irish are the nation’s best free-throw shooting team, and they led 59-58 when Matt Farrell stepped to the line for a one-and-one that could extend the lead to three with just more than 10 seconds to play. But Farrell missed the front end to leave the door wide open for the Tigers.
Princeton rushed up the court and Cannady launched his three with about three seconds left. Notre Dame’s Steve Vasturia pulled down the rebound and was fouled with a fraction of a second left. He made one free throw and missed the next. Game over.
Princeton is known for its three-point shooting and backdoor cuts, ingredients of Tigers’ tournament upsets in the 1990s, when Princeton coach Mitch Henderson played there. He thought that last three was going to go. But the threes weren’t falling on this day for the Tigers. They hit just 8 of 31, including Cannady’s 2 of 10.
“That shot’s gone in for us an awful lot, Devin’s shot,” Henderson said. “It was a great look for us. I think we tried to get to the rim (for the rebound) but I thought Notre Dame, they’re smart, they’re tough. They don’t really put anybody on the floor who doesn’t have a ton of experience. And I thought that was the story of the game, as they had a lot more experience in the moment, and it showed.”
It was a physical game. Notre Dame’s Rex Pflueger got a gash in his head but played on.
“We glued him up,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey said. “We would have stitched any other of our guys, but since he’s from LA, and he’s into Hollywood, we didn’t want to mess his face up.”
It’s easy to tell jokes when you survive and advance. Harder when you miss an opportunity for the immortality of replay montages.
“It’s horrible,” Cannady said. “You have this biggest stage. You have this chance to knock off a team and continue on in the tournament and now you have to go home, so it’s a horrible feeling.”
Even more since Notre Dame was the team of his dreams. Cannady is from Mishawaka, Ind., near Notre Dame’s campus in South Bend.
"You want to go to a school like that, especially growing up,” he said. “Then, once it becomes a reality that you’re getting scholarship offers and you don’t get one from them, yeah, you wish that could happen, but it obviously didn’t.”
He said he is lucky to be at Princeton, which he called a great school with great teammates.
“I wish I could have that shot back, and put it in, obviously,” Cannady said. “All my teammates and my coaches have confidence in me taking that shot, and I do as well. It’s just unfortunate.”
In the movies, those last-second shots rotate in slow motion. Did the game slow down for him in the crucible of the moment?
“No,” he said, and here he laughed a little. “It happened pretty fast, to be honest.”
He said he thought he’d play with a chip on his shoulder against Notre Dame but once the game started, he found it felt like any other game. Until it didn’t.
“It didn’t go in and that’s what happens when you take those shots,” Cannady said. “It either does, or it doesn’t. In this case, it didn’t. And the rest is …”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.
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