CRAWFORD | McKneely finds his shot, and Louisville finds a way in NCAA Tournament win | Sports
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WDRB) — When Isaac McKneely shoots and the ball doesn’t go in, he assumes the universe has made a clerical error.
Thursday afternoon, he made everything right.
Funny how that works. Make 7 of 10 from three, score 23 points, and the earth tilts back into place.
And a Louisville team that spent the final ten minutes trying to misplace an NCAA Tournament win somehow held onto it, 83-79 over a desperate and furiously closing South Florida team in KeyBank Center.
This was not a masterpiece.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
This was a man with a jumper and a team with just enough of everything else.
A week ago, McKneely had staples in his head. Not metaphorical staples. Real ones. Medical. The kind that suggest your week has not gone particularly smoothly.
“It’s because I got my staples out yesterday and I’m feeling — no, I’m kidding,” he told the media after his career-high in made threes and his season-high in scoring. “I did get them out, though.”
Good timing. Because Louisville needed a man with a clear head and a short memory.
The staples weren’t the only thing he was managing. McKneely revealed after the game that shoulder issues had limited his shooting during the week leading up to Thursday.
But he also had a whole new outlook.
“It’s a brand-new season,” McKneely said. “We cut the slate clean.”
Shooters believe in clean slates the way gamblers believe in the next hand. Whatever happened before is either irrelevant or a misunderstanding.
McKneely had been “struggling,” which in shooter language means “temporarily betrayed by mathematics.” Against Quad 1 teams this season, he was shooting 32.1 percent from three. He’d shot 33.3 percent from beyond the arc, five points below his season percentage, over the previous ten games.
Numbers that suggested caution. Except that shooters do not recognize caution as a concept.
“As a shooter, you’ve got to continue to think the next shot’s going in always,” McKneely said.
Always, in this context, is not a statistic. It’s a decision.
His teammates have made the same one.
“I always think he’s about to cook,” Ryan Conwell said of McKneely. “The next shot is always going in.”
Khani Rooths watches for the signal.
Isaac McKneely reacts to a made three-pointer in the first half of Louisville’s NCAA Tournament win over South Florida.
“I know when he starts to do that little hand motion,” Rooths said — a quick reset of the fingers, like a pianist finding the keys — “he’s going to get it going.”
That hand motion is less a gesture than a warning label. Proceed with caution. Shooter active.
McKneely got active early. Four threes in the first half. Louisville running. South Florida chasing shadows and occasionally the ball.
“You see your first couple go down,” McKneely said, “your confidence continues to build.”
Confidence, in this case, built into a 23-point lead.
And then Louisville did what nervous teams do in March.
It looked at that lead, admired it briefly, and began trying to give it away.
South Florida pressed. Louisville retreated. Twenty-two turnovers. Not a typo. Twenty-two. The Bulls scored 24 points off Cardinals turnovers, 16 of them in the second half. Passes disappeared. Dribbles wandered off. Possessions ended without warning.
“It was the longest ten minutes of my life,” Pat Kelsey said.
This is where McKneely’s work mattered most, not in the moment, but before it.
He had already stretched the floor, bent the defense, created the kind of margin that allows a team to survive its own worst instincts.
Because Louisville did not win this game cleanly.
It won it early. Everything after that was maintenance. Difficult, stressful, occasionally alarming maintenance. But maintenance all the same.
Afterward, McKneely declined to behave like a man who had just authored the game’s most important chapter.
He talked about his coach. Asked what it meant to play his outsized role in Pat Kelsey’s first NCAA Tournament win in six tries, he embraced the question.
“It means the world. Nobody deserves it more than this guy,” he said, nodding to his coach. “He’s in the building 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. He wants to win more than any of us. Just super happy for him.”
He talked about belief, too — not just in his shot, but in a team that spent the season proving doubters wrong. Nearly 40 percent of ESPN’s public bracket had South Florida pulling the upset. Louisville used it.
“A lot of people picked against us. We just used it as motivation,” McKneely said. “For us, it’s just about the belief in our locker room. It’s 25 Strong.”
The slogan earns credibility when it holds a team together while things are falling apart.
And make no mistake, things looked like they were falling apart when South Florida’s press turned the final minutes into a test of nerve and ball security, two things Louisville treated more like suggestions than requirements.
But they had something else. They had a shooter who never stopped believing the next one was going in.
He did not hesitate. He shot. Seven times, the universe agreed with him.
And Louisville, clinging to those seven small acts of certainty, is still playing basketball.
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