The slipper fits perfectly for oral Roberts

On a court filled with “MARCH MADNESS”, about 90 seconds into his first NCAA men’s tournament game, Max Abmas removed the logo without hesitation. Oral Roberts’ star entered on Friday as the country’s top scorer with 24.2 points per game. Certainly, the state of Ohio knew how to choke him at any time. Abmas’s response was to shoot further back. He drilled the depth of 3 points, increasing his team’s lead to 7-0 in a game that the Golden Eagles, with 15th division, would win in overtime by 75-72.

As always, it would be foolish to look back at Oral Roberts’ improbable Sweet 16 run and say it was easy to see what was going on. FiveThirtyEight’s March Madness model estimated the Golden Eagles’ chances at 6 percent in the first round against Ohio. The Slingshot model by Peter Keating and Jordan Brenner, which rewards teams that have a propensity to score and score 3 points, sets the underdog’s odds at 9 percent. And when seed # 15 lost by 8 in the first half of Friday, Ken Pomeroy had a 2.3 percent probability of victory. By any stretch, the disorder was far-fetched, as were the eight previous 15-to-2 disorders.

But Oral Roberts’ confidence in individual star power dates back to another victorious No. 15 seed – Lehigh, led by CJ McCollum in 2012. McCollum exploded on the scene with 30 points in a defeat in Duke’s first round, then transformed that performance in a first round draft choice the following year. Abmas is a sophomore and has had only five high school scholarship offers: from Oral Roberts, Marist, Air Force, Army and Navy. Throughout the season, he has accumulated points in McCollum-style obscurity. He had already lost 28 points against Wichita State, 33 against Oklahoma State and 20 against Oklahoma earlier in the season.

It turned out that Abmas had the perfect shot to defeat even a Big Ten defense. In the season, he made 27.9 percent of his shots not just behind the 3-point line, but 25 to 30 feet from the basket, according to CBB Analytics. And although he is a great 3-point shooter overall – 86th in the country with 43.1 percent – his accuracy will really go above to 45.2 percent in that 25 to 30 foot range. So yes, the state of Ohio followed the patrol report and made Abmas’ shots as difficult as possible – but he kept shooting anyway.

Like McCollum, Abmas was well qualified to serve as the owner of a number 15 seed. His offensive rating KenPom is 122.8, third in the country this season and 22 since KenPom started monitoring the metric for the 2003-04 season. (McCollum’s 2011-12 offensive rating was 113.6.) And he has a more than capable teammate, Kevin Obanor, who scored 30 on Friday and 28 on Sunday against Florida. Since 2000, only 21 players have scored at least 26 points twice in the first week of the NCAA Tournament; Abmas and Obanor are two of them.

In retrospect, Oral Roberts surprised the state of Ohio and then Florida because he played the role of Cinderella perfectly. The Golden Eagles are elite in some categories: They are the best free-throw team in the country (82.4 percent), they make 46.4 percent of their 3-point pitches (18^º nationally), they make 38.2 percent of these three (15^º nationally), and avoid turnover (15.4 percent of possessions, 15^º nationally). These numbers alone would not have been enough to bring down a team in the top ten, of course. But they at least made that opportunity possible.

As Oral Roberts limited turnover (six, compared to 16 in Ohio), it took more field goal attempts (70 to 67), despite being overtaken by 17. It was no accident: “We are among the top 25 in the country for not turning around is over, and the state of Ohio is the 336th in the country to cause twists and turns, ”coach Paul Mills told reporters after the game. “So, we knew we were going into a game where there wouldn’t be a lot of pressure.” And as the Golden Eagles fired half of their 70 shots from a distance of 3 points, they resisted even as they suffered from a predictable decrease in accuracy against a Big Ten team. This was also no accident: “They fired from everywhere,” said Ohio State coach Chris Holtmann, as his team prepared for the week. And Oral Roberts hit everywhere, shooting 5 to 9 from 7 to 9 meters.

Oral Roberts’ high-risk strategy may seem like a no-brainer, but it is easier said than done. In the last 10 NCAA tournaments, only 16 teams have attempted 35 points out of 3 in a game, and Oral Roberts was the only one to do so as the number 15 seeded. This season, only one other team is among the top 20 in the country, both in the 3-point attempt rate and the 3-point make-up rate.

Of the top eight placed in 15th place that got surprises in the first round, only one – Florida Gulf Coast in 2013 – made it to Sweet 16. In search of an encore on Sunday against 7th place in Florida, Oral Roberts simply ran he came back and implemented the same strategy it used against the state of Ohio, taking 53 percent of its shots from three, while Florida took just 38 percent. The Golden Eagles lost 11 with 9:46 to play, but once those three started to fall – Oral Roberts scored four of his last eight points out of 3 – they favored the underdog again. In what could have been his last media timeout for the season, coach Paul Mills returned to the reliable 3 points. “You will have a chance to win or put us up, and I need you to take those three down,” he told DeShang Weaver, and with 2:10 left, Weaver got it right to give Oral Roberts the lead for Boa.

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