UConn’s Miracle, Weirdest NBA Season Ever, A Scary Playoff Team Draft, and an Iffy Expansion Plan With Zach Lowe

**Bill Simmons** (0:00)
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It's The Bill Simmons Podcast, presented by The Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find Zach Lowe's podcast, The Zach Lowe Show, Tuesdays, Thursdays. You can also find the rewatchables, where it is almost the end of CR mode, Zach. We have LA Confidential is gonna be the last rewatchables we put up on Monday. This was a great basketball weekend. I know you're not a huge college hoops guy, but you are a Connecticut guy, and we had one of the great comebacks of all time. So we're gonna get in a whole bunch of NBA stuff, but we had an unbelievable UConn comeback and game winner against Duke. And I was thinking like when you have these, when you're down like basically 20, and you're heading into the second half, and we see this scenario with NBA college all the time, it's basically the two part comeback followed by some sort of mini miracle is the way it goes down, right? You go from 20 to like 11, then you're around between nine and 11 for a while, and then you make that one last run to get to within two, three, but then you still need still need some help, and they got some help. So did you see the last play? And did you feel like that was a great UConn player or a terrible Duke play?

**Zach Lowe** (2:17)
First of all, what a delight. This is this is two years in a row that Duke loses late in the tournament and just epic fashion. We can all agree, anybody but Duke and just yes, truly an insane end to the game. I can't say that I saw a lot of it, but I saw the last 30, 40 seconds of the game. You know, I guess Boozer got a little flack for, what did he panic? Couldn't he have just held onto the ball and gotten fouled? That's like kind of an instinctual play, right? Like this, like you think you're being smart by like, oh, we're going to run the clock. I'll just lob it up and crazy the flag. I think it was a great play. Like the steal was great. The pass and pass back was great. Obviously the shot is an all time killer shot. And Dan Hurley, another round for your UConn Huskies, baby.

**Bill Simmons** (2:59)
It was honestly a great, great, great coaching job. Sometimes I feel like college coaches almost get too much credit because they're the only constants at these schools and the cameras are always showing them. He was like, knock it. They were down 19-17, 19-15, and he was on the sidelines. Like it was a two point game. Just going crazy. He was doing this with the crowd heading into timeouts.

**Zach Lowe** (3:22)
Yeah, he's a psycho. Dan's a psycho.

**Bill Simmons** (3:25)
But he just basically wouldn't let them quit. But I felt like that, first of all, I don't know why every college team doesn't press. Like if you have great athletes, I think you should at least know how to like trap press it to some form, right? So they get, they're basically down two. They missed first free throw, get the second. And they're like, we can get the ball back. We practice this. We're ready. And they get poor Kate and Boozer in the middle of the court.
And honestly, it was like one of those plays where like five things had to happen perfectly at the same time. They send the two guys rushing at him, right? He's got two teammates wide open, 50 feet away.

**Zach Lowe** (4:02)
You can see his thinking. Like there are two guys on me. Like all I got to do is roll on past the game, the game's over.

**Bill Simmons** (4:08)
But the problem is that because UConn practices all the time, they know, oh, either he thinks we're going to foul or not. If he starts to throw to the wide open guys, we're just jumping up like this. And they were like synchronized swimmers. The way they both went up at the same time tipped it. But then the kid had to make a 38 foot shot. And it's not like he was red hot during the game either. So unbelievable when, I don't know, did you see the CBS? They had the camera on Grant Hill and Bill Raftery.