March 8, 2022
Would you believe me if I said there was only one upset in the SoCon tournament this year? After The Citadel surprised ETSU in overtime, every other game went according to chalk. But if you assumed that meant this bracket was devoid of drama, you'd be sorely mistaken. In the quarterfinals alone, The Citadel spooked the #1 overall seed, Max Klesmit hit a game-winning and-one over VMI with seven seconds left, and UNC-Greensboro overcome a 44-22 halftime deficit to very nearly stun Samford. And when the Bulldogs, having narrowly survived that assault, faced a Furman team with designs of snapping a 42-year championship drought, the result was a thrilling back-and-forth duel in which the Paladins surged ahead in the final seconds and eked out a harrowing victory. For about a day, that was the game of the year in the SoCon (well, that, or Samford's 100-99 overtime win over VMI earlier in the season).
It's a moot point which of those two Bulldog battles was better, though, because they were indisputably relegated to second and third on Monday. In the final game of the tournament, #1 Chattanooga faced #2 Furman for the title, the former looking to put the finishing touches on a masterful multi-year rebuild and the latter trying to finally get over the hump and win a title for the first time since 1980. It was an intriguing matchup that promised a good game, but what it produced was insanity. It was the game of the year in the SoCon—and I daresay it's the game of the year in all of college basketball.
#1 Chattanooga 64, #2 Furman 63 (OT)
Things got off to a slow start in the championship game. At the U16 media timeout, the score was Mocs 2, Paladins 0, and Furman (22-12, 14-7) was already 0-for-5. Chattanooga (27-7, 17-4) was just 1-for-6, but it's not exactly fair to pin that on the whole team, because David Jean-Baptiste alone accounted for four of the five missed shots. It was, to say the least, not good basketball. Fortunately, both teams woke up out of the timeout, hitting five shots in a row to make it a 7-7 game in under two minutes, and from there the game proceeded as a less-remarkably-low-scoring affair.
Up front, I should give several players their dues, because most individual performances are going to get lost in the whirlwind of the last few minutes of regulation and the five minutes of overtime. Mike Bothwell had a fantastic SoCon tournament, and he capped it with a 24-point showing in the final (on 9-of-13 from the floor) to lead all scorers. Alex Hunter also stepped up in a tight spot for Furman, scoring 12 points and jointly leading the team in rebounds alongside Bothwell. The statistical star for the Mocs, meanwhile, was one Silvio De Sousa—yes, the guy from Kansas who almost threw a chair that one time. (And yes, I can't believe it took this long for him to come up, but he's somehow only the third-best player on Chattanooga. Go figure.) De Sousa led the team with 17 points and dominated the boards with 14 rebounds, all while playing just 30 minutes and attempting just 10 shots. Conference player of the year Malachi Smith had a decent performance as well, putting up 12 points and adding 8 rebounds, but he was just 4-for-12 from inside the arc and lost five turnovers.
After the scoring barrage let up, Jean-Baptiste missed two more shots and Jalen Slawson hit a big three to give Furman their first lead. They stretched it to 16-9 as Jean-Baptiste committed a foul and missed yet another three-point attempt, which (if you're keeping score) made him 0-for-7. The Mocs' five-year veteran finally hit a shot after 11:53, thank goodness, but Furman continued to stretch out their lead as Chattanooga's offence ran painfully cold. The Paladins picked up steam heading into halftime, with Hunter and Bothwell making a pair of threes in the last few minutes to secure a 26-16 advantage over a usually-potent Mocs attack. It wasn't exactly pretty, but Furman was well on the way towards a long-awaited return to the postseason.
At this point, it's helpful to take a step back and look at what, exactly, made Chattanooga so good on offence for most of the season. Most obviously, Malachi Smith's surge in his second season carried on into complete domination in his third, as he led the conference in points per game and won SoCon POTY as an underclassman. Adding De Sousa, though not quite as impactful as might have been hoped, was also key, as his 11 points per game as a critical sixth man provided the Mocs with much-needed depth. And while Smith's breakout and De Sousa's arrival were welcome surprises, Jean-Baptiste was always a guaranteed star for this team—he's played a record 151 games at Chattanooga and has averaged over 12.5 PPG for the last three seasons.
But wrangling all these pieces has been far from easy for the Mocs, and trying to build a team out of an upstart superstar, a hot-tempered transfer, and an experienced super-senior isn't exactly an easy prospect. Lamont Paris won the Coach of the Year award in the SoCon for making it work, and rightfully so, but it's fair to say Chattanooga might not be here if it weren't for Jean-Baptiste's role in that recalibration. He's gone from clear team leader to Smith's sidekick, and while nobody would deny he's one of the best players in the league, his minutes, field goal rate, rebounds, assists, steals, and points per game all dipped from last season to this one.
The SoCon is full of likable players, and Jean-Baptiste is merely one among a crowd of instantly-endearing players. From Ques Glover, the sophomore whose breakout season nearly carried Samford all the way to the championship game, to Hayden Brown, who has played an eternity at The Citadel and never seen them rise out of the basement despite his best efforts, to Jalen Slawson, the defensive player of the year who had a career day on offence in the semifinal showdown between Furman and Samford—some of the best stories in basketball have converged on this conference lately. It's easy to lose a fifth-year player shifting into a new role amid all that chaos, but the way Jean-Baptiste's adjustment enabled Chattanooga to put together a remarkable season shouldn't be forgotten.
That's why the end of this game, which I promise we'll get back to in just a moment, is so uniquely special: not just for the madness that conference tournaments always provide in the glorious days of early March, but particularly because it ensured one commendable player's tale will be told as often as it deserves.
Out of the half, the Mocs immediately broke off a run to steal the lead, opening the half with a 13-2 stretch to go up by one. Around this point, the scoring began to catch up to expectations, not just for Chattanooga but for Furman as well. Employing the services of Smith, De Sousa, Jean-Baptiste, Darius Banks, and emerging bench player KC Hankton, the Mocs jumped out to a 40-32 lead heading into the final ten minutes, a run capped by a Jean-Baptiste three on Smith's assist. But the Paladins struck back, scoring seven to claw within a point, and Chattanooga needed an electric run of play from De Sousa to reclaim a 46-41 advantage going into the final media timeout.
From this point forward, in the last nine minutes of the game, Furman would miss just one shot. But the Mocs were right there with them, and after a huge Bothwell three tied it up with 2:18 to play, Smith responded with an and-one to regain the lead. Garrett Hien brought the Paladins within one, and both teams exchanged empty possessions before Chattanooga got the ball with 51 seconds to play. The Mocs burned as much time as they could, then set up Jean-Baptiste at the top of the key for a dagger. His shot nearly fell short, but De Sousa swooped in and tipped it in to give Chattanooga a 51-48 lead. With no timeouts left, Bothwell took the lead as he had all game, baiting Smith into defending against a play in the paint before turning tail and getting just enough separation to launch a desperation three. With four seconds left, it rattled in. Tie game. Smith took the ball the length of the court and got a half-decent shot off, but Slawson blocked it at the buzzer, and the SoCon championship game was headed to overtime for the first time in a decade.
From this point forward, Furman attempted six shots and made all of them. After De Sousa opened the extra period with a layup, Bothwell responded with an and-one, and a missed Jean-Baptiste three solidified the Paladins' early advantage. Bothwell lost a turnover, then immediately redeemed himself by stealing the ball from Smith and turning it into a jumper for the three-point lead. Chattanooga responded with a repeat of the Jean-Baptiste-to-De-Sousa play from regulation, but this time Jean-Baptiste banked the shot home without help, bringing the Mocs level once again. (They promptly called a timeout, for some inexplicable reason.) Furman responded with a gorgeous stepback three from Hunter over Smith, but a borderline blocking foul on Slawson gave Banks a pair of free throws, which he hit to bring Chattanooga within one. Showing possible concussion symptoms from incidental contact after the play, Slawson was helped to the bench, though he clearly wanted to stay in the game. As coaches tended to his bloody nose, he could only watch the gripping finale.
Now leading 59-58, Furman had the ball with 1:10 on the clock. That set up a golden opportunity for a two-for-one, granting the Paladins a guaranteed extra possession, and they took advantage, running most of the time off the clock before Bothwell got in the paint and assisted a lovely Hien layup. For the second time in as many periods, a team trailed by three in the waning seconds of the game, needing a last-ditch shot just to tie. Smith initially went for a two, but kicked out to AJ Caldwell at the last second, who connected for just the second time all game to save the season. But the Paladins, as planned, got the ball back with enough time to make a Mocs response all but irrelevant, and who else but Mike Bothwell should drive to the basket and bank in a masterful shot off the backboard?
If Chattanooga couldn't respond, it would be a moment that would live forever in postseason lore. Bothwell is a player cut from the same cloth as Jean-Baptiste—an experienced veteran who led the roster in 2021, but found himself upstaged in 2022 and handled the transition elegantly to help key his team to further success. This was his 121st game in a Furman uniform, and it was one of his finest. To cap it off with an isolation shot at the end of overtime to snap a four-decade drought and send the Paladins to March Madness would have been incredible. So before we celebrate the narrative that will be retold through the generations, it's worth taking a moment to honour one that won't get its due.
So: 4.3 seconds on the clock, down by two in overtime, a trip to the NCAA tournament on the line. Who do you give the ball to? Malachi Smith is having one of the best seasons in program history, but he's had a bit of an off day. If you're looking for a three, it seems Caldwell may be your man: he just hit a critical shot from beyond the arc on your last possession, and going for the two with Smith only to surprise with a Caldwell three could work twice. Of course, you don't need a three, and if you can get downcourt fast enough, De Sousa has been a force at the rim, hitting seven of his ten shots. If you figure double OT is the way to go, that's all but a guarantee. And, of course, Chattanooga does have a timeout here. With just a few ticks left, it'd be tough, but they could try to call it and draw up the ideal play for this tense situation. So what does Paris, the coach of the year in the Southern Conference, decide to do? None of the above. Smith inbounds to Jean-Baptiste, who beats two Furman defenders to get past midcourt and put up a prayer from forty feet out.
There's a part in The History of the Seattle Mariners, an epic six-part documentary by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein that absolutely everybody should watch, in which Bois completes the unbelievable story of the 1995 ALCS and then takes a step back. He's just shown us the Mariners winning the last three games of the series, including a walkoff win at a stadium that would likely have been demolished if they hadn't defeated the Yankees in that winner-take-all match, and he sits back and deadpans: 'It's so beautifully, obnoxiously fake. The superstar slides into home to beat the bad guy....A moment like this has no business in our world.' In an oeuvre that spans everything from the history of athletes named Bob to the fictional misadventures of sentient spacecraft, I've got to admit that my favourite Bois quote is this quiet, disbelieving response. Even when you think, talk, and write about sports every day, they will always find some way to surprise you.
Would you believe me if I said that Jean-Baptiste's shot hit nothing but net? Of course you wouldn't. It's beautifully, obnoxiously fake.
And it's true.
Jean-Baptiste and his teammates celebrate with the SoCon tournament trophy.
(Kathy Kmonicek/AP)