Knight shoots to kill in Bruins’ last-second win

  EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Senior guard
Billy Knight pulls up for a jump shot. He later
hit the game-winning 3-point shot for UCLA’s 67-65 win over the
Trojans. UCLA 67 USC 65

By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Billy Knight had taken similar shots before.

Wide open, behind the arc.

He’d taken them during practices, during shoot-arounds,
during games.

But this one, Knight noticed, felt different. Right behind him
in the Pauley Pavilion stands, a hooligan-like crowd of 12,810
screamed, but he couldn’t hear it. Time, it seemed, sat
still.

Then the ball went through the orange iron ring and softy
touched the net.

At that instant, as Knight regained his hearing, he realized
that, yes, this shot was different from others: it was a
buzzer-beating game winner against USC, at home, in his senior
year.

Final score: 67-65, UCLA.

Only moments before, UCLA was on the verge of adding a
well-deserved loss to its record, having done everything in its
power to blow an 11-point lead.

Up 61-50 with less than six minutes remaining, the Bruins found
themselves down 65-64 with 33.9 seconds to go. They hadn’t
hit a field goal in six and a half minutes.

But in a game where incompetence on both sides negated each
other to create a close finish, where neither team was able to put
the other away for good, the Bruins were given another shot.

They were given three, in fact.

Coming out of a time out, Bruin freshman guard Cedric Bozeman
looked and looked for forward Jason Kapono, but couldn’t find
him.

So he did what most players in his position with similar
abilities would have done: he drove to the basket and threw up a
prayer.

The ball went off the backboard, but center Dan Gadzuric got a
hand on it.

That shot, too, didn’t want to go in.

But as luck would have it, the ball found its way back into the
hands of Gadzuric, who was surrounded by four Trojans under the
basket.

Instead of forcing a put-back, Gadzuric skipped the ball across
the floor over to Knight. USC guard Gennaro Bustera desperately
rushed out from under the basket to challenge the shot, but was
nowhere near in time.

UCLA improved to 16-6 overall, 8-4 in the Pacific-10. USC sports
an identical record after the loss.

“The first thing I thought was to look at the
clock,” said Knight, who scored 14 points in the contest.
“I thought time had expired.

“It seemed like the Matrix. I saw Dan and nobody else. It
seemed like the ball took half an hour to come out. I didn’t
hear the crowd. I felt like I was there by myself. When I heard the
swish, I heard the crowd again.”

Twenty minutes after the game, Bruin head coach Steve Lavin was
still shaking his head in disbelief.

“Wow,” he said to himself as he walked out of the
post-game press conference.

In the first half, the Bruins were thoroughly outplayed by the
Trojans, who repeatedly pounded the ball into forward Sam Clancy
and led 39-33 at the break.

UCLA rotated poorly within its defensive zone, often leaving a
completely undersized and overmatched guard to stop Clancy.

The Trojan senior took advantage of the mismatches, scoring 17
points and grabbing nine rebounds before halftime. He finished the
game with 24 points and 14 boards.

“All the shots he was getting was because he was playing
harder,” senior guard Rico Hines said. “We
weren’t matching his intensity. He carried the
team.”

“In the first half, we were a little tentative,”
Lavin added. “We were a little scared. Then we kind of lost
our heads.”

In the second half, though, it was the Trojans’ turn to
lose their heads.

UCLA, led by Kapono, who scored a game-high 26 points, was more
patient on both ends of the floor, while USC was clearly rattled by
the vulgar Bruin crowd.

UCLA put bodies on Clancy and stuffed the middle, steadily
building up a lead.

Then the Bruins collapsed.

“God’s helping us out,” Knight said,
shrugging. “It’s like divine intervention or something.
The ball rolls our way.”