Loyd emerges from shadows to provide BYU lifeline
OKLAHOMA CITY -- This is no time for an "I told you so." Not from me. Not about Jimmer Fredette of Brigham Young.
Although I did tell you so. Told you he would hang 30 or 40 on Florida, and I'll be damned if he didn't do just that. He scored 37 on Thursday as the seventh-seeded Cougars beat No. 10 Florida 99-92 in double overtime.
But this is no time for me to brag about my BYU knowledge, because I didn't tell you ahead of time about Michael Loyd Jr. Truth? I had never heard of Michael Loyd Jr. Not until Thursday, when he lit up the Gators for 26 points and was the biggest reason -- yes, bigger than my boy Jimmer Fredette -- for BYU's first NCAA tournament victory in nine attempts dating to 1993.
I'm not the only one who has been unfamiliar with Michael Loyd Jr. Pretty sure his own coach didn't know who he was before Thursday. Coming into this game, Loyd was averaging 4.6 points in 13.4 minutes per game. He has been Cougars coach Dave Rose's ninth man, which is a laugh riot -- because if there are eight players at BYU who are better than Michael Loyd Jr., the Cougars need to skip the second round of the NCAA tournament and go straight to the NBA's Western Conference semifinals.
Loyd's 26-point outburst Thursday was a career-high, and not by a little bit. He had scored in double figures just five times all season, with a high of 19. You want to hear something even weirder? Loyd had scored zero points in 11 games this season, which means he had been more than twice as likely to not score as he was to score even 10 points. But when he goes off, he goes off. He had 18 points against Utah on March 3 -- all in the first half.
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"When people game-plan for Jimmer, you need a Michael Loyd with the skills he has to dribble, to penetrate, to make little floaters, to hit shots," Rose said. "You can use that option when [the other team] guards certain ways to stop Jimmer. [Loyd] was unbelievable."
Fredette and Loyd weren't the only high-scoring guards in this game. Florida freshman Kenny Boynton had been a bad shooter for a shooting guard (28.5 percent on 3s) until Thursday, when he made half of his 10 attempts and scored 27 points, including 14 in a row for Florida to lead the Gators out of a big second-half hole. By the time Boynton was done, a 59-49 BYU lead had been cut to 66-63, and soon the Gators were leading 71-68 after Boynton squeezed off a knuckling 3-pointer with 2:41 left in regulation. In 5½ minutes, he had scored 17 points.
With Boynton scoring like that, and with a 45-33 edge in rebounding that was most glaring on the Gators' offensive glass, Florida should have won this game. The Gators had the final shots at the end of regulation and the first overtime, but they couldn't come up with anything good. Chandler Parsons missed a 15-footer in regulation, and then in overtime it was Boynton -- 30 feet from the basket, jumping into the air, nowhere to go -- who lobbed a prayer into the lane that was volleyball-flicked off the backboard by Dan Werner.
Couple those two bad possessions with some other game-losing trends for the Gators -- 21 turnovers, 32 mostly silly attempts on 3-pointers, an inability to stop the 6-foot-2, below-the-rim Fredette from scoring from point-blank range -- and it was a Florida fusillade of fail.
And even with all that, Florida wins this game if it weren't for Michael Loyd Jr. In regulation, I mean. The Gators win in regulation, and they might even have clinched it before halftime if it weren't for Loyd. Florida led 28-21 and Fredette was struggling to score and his teammates were simply abysmal -- missing layups and free throws -- when Loyd, released from his ninth-man hell, rescued the Cougars with 1½ ridiculous minutes.
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| Michael Loyd Jr. scores 26 points in a career-best performance for BYU. (AP) |
Such was the zone Loyd was in that he didn't know he scored 10 straight points until a reporter told him afterward.
"That's the first time I heard that," he said. "The ball happened to be in my hands."
Midway through Loyd's one-man show, Rose was emboldened to give Fredette -- who would play 46 minutes by the time this game was over -- his only real rest of the day. Even when Loyd's 10-0 stretch was over, Fredette stayed on the bench a few minutes longer. Energized by Loyd, the Cougars got two more solid offensive possessions and four points from forward Noah Hartsock and guard Tyler Haws. At halftime BYU led 35-33, and other than Boynton's berserker in the second half, the Cougars stayed mostly in control.
Fredette scored 29 points after halftime, even though he was clearly exhausted -- he missed two late free throws, and he shoots 90 percent from the line -- and came out of the game for only 12 seconds in the final 30 minutes.
"You're playing for your life," he said. "It's one-and-done at this point. It's all adrenaline."
With 29 points after halftime this game was won by Fredette, yes, but it was won by Loyd too. While Fredette found a million ways to score around the basket, looking like that guy from your YMCA -- the guy you think you should be able to guard, but can't -- Loyd was launching himself at the rim like a bat from hell. He darted and spun and juked and scored, over and over and over, while the Florida defense watched. Because Florida, like me, apparently had never heard of Loyd before this game.
That oversight cost me some bragging rights this day. But it cost the Gators their season.
