Maryland is moving on to San Francisco. Whether it traveled to get there is up for debate.
Derik Queen’s controversial buzzer-beater lifted the Terrapins to a 72-71 win over Colorado State on Sunday night in a wild second-round NCAA Tournament game in Seattle.
Down 71-70, coming out of a timeout with 3.7 seconds to play, Maryland got the ball to the 6-foot-10 freshman. Queen – who, in the team huddle, strongly requested to take the final shot – dribbled twice to his left, cradled the ball in his left arm and took a debatable number of strides before releasing a fadeaway floater with his right hand while moving to his left. It banked in as the final horn sounded.
The play had experts on television and fans on social media questioning the legality of the move, but, either way, the Terrapins will face Florida in a West Regional semifinal on Friday at Chase Center.
“That was my first game-winner and when Coach drew up the play, my teammates trusted me, he trusted me,” Queen who scored a team-high 17 points. “I was a little bit, like, nervous, but I knew we were due for one and I had to make this.”
Queen’s game-winner was as clutch as it was questionable. In the post-game press conference, Colorado State coach Niko Medved said he had not yet seen a replay of the shot.
“It’s going to be hard for me to watch,” Medved said. “I’m sure I will at some point. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter, they didn’t call one. So, whether it was or wasn’t, they didn’t call one and they never go back and change the call. But again, he made a really difficult shot, guys. I mean, he made a really, really difficult shot and they just made one more play than we did.”
The Rams’ last shot had all the familiar markings of a March moment to remember. Down 70-68 with 12 seconds to play, Colorado State inbounded the ball to star Nique Clifford, who led the team with 21 points.
Clifford worked for a shot on the perimeter, then slung a pass across the court to Jalen Lake, who knocked down a go-ahead 3-pointer.
“We had drew the play up for Nique and he found me right on the wing, and then, yeah, that shot went in,” Lake said. “It felt great to see that go in. But just wish there wasn’t time left on the clock.”
It would have been the game’s signature play, if not for Queen’s crowning moment.
Willard joked that, if he had known Queen had never hit a game-winner before, he might’ve drawn up a play for someone else. But hearing the fun-loving freshman effectively demand the ball during the timeout was enough to convince Willard.
“His exact words, ‘I want the M-F ball,’” Willard said of the Baltimore native. “So, once he said that, it was a pretty simple decision. And I could see everyone’s body language kind of perk up a little bit because he was so confident in the fact that he wanted the basketball. So, it was just a simple zipper, give him the basketball and let him go to work.
Maryland got 70 of its 72 points from its starters = nicknamed The Crab Five – and each of whom reached double figures. It was outrebounded 39-29.
The Terrapins trailed by five, 64-59, with five minutes to go.
But six points from Julian Reese in the final 3:47 helped set up Queen’s game-winner.
Willard reached the Sweet 16 in his eighth tournament appearance, and – in Willard fashion – was candid about what the moment meant to him, noting his lingering frustration that he never got Seton Hall past the opening weekend in his 12 years with the Pirates.
“I know it’s always been on my back and it’s always been a stigma, but I knew I had confidence in myself that eventually if you keep getting to this tournament, which my teams keep getting to this tournament, that I was eventually going to knock the door down,” Willard said. “I wish I would have done it at Seton Hall, to be honest with you, first. It’s a place I loved and still love and they were so good to me. I wish I would have been able to do it there. But I’m glad that — this is only our second Sweet 16 in 23 years here – so I’m just as happy that it happened at Maryland.”
