A basketball game ending with free throws is normally boring as hell—one team is up by seven with 30 seconds left, so they go to the line a few times and make it a 10-point win. Here’s to VCU for at least making the lead-ups to its game-winning free throws intriguing (and a kind of weak, but mostly intriguing.)
For the second time in a week, VCU won a game on a pair of free throws with 0.4 seconds remaining. The Rams’ latest victory by charity stripe came Wednesday night at George Washington. VCU (19-5) should have creamed the Colonials (12-12) but George Washington, which allowed upwards of 80 points in each of its past two games, actually decided to play defense and found itself clinging to a 53-52 lead with under a second remaining. All the Colonials had to do was not let the Rams pull off a Laettner shot. And not foul.
They managed the first task, as GW picked off VCU’s inbounds pass. But by then, the whistle had already been blown—Rams guard JeQuan Lewis sprinted toward Colin Gosss, GW’s on-ball baseline defender, and took a charge as inbounds man Justin Tillman led the unsuspecting Goss right into Lewis. The senior calmly sank his free throws at the other end of the court to claim the Rams’s second-straight last-second win on free throws.
Winning on a charge is some weak shit, but VCU gets a pass here for being smart enough to draw up the play for Goss, who only entered the game for that play—his statline was straight zeros aside from his one foul.
On Saturday, VCU won a pair of free throws after one eager St. Bonaventure fan took the game ball and another bumped into an official with 0.4 seconds left— thinking the game was over, the fans also rushed the court, but the A10 said in a statement that the technical was called on the two fans who interfered with the refs and the ball.