Kentucky's final play wasn't drawn up for Malachi Moreno, but he executed it to perfection

Malachi Moreno’s buzzer-beater vs. LSU will go down in Kentucky Basketball history. Think of it as the anti-Christian Laettner shot. Sure, this was a regular-season game at LSU, not the Elite Eight, but given how this season was tracking in the first half, it still feels huge. And even though the play looked effortless, it didn’t happen the way it was meant to at all.

After the 75-74 win, Malachi Moreno joined Goose Givens on the radio and revealed that the final play wasn’t drawn up for him. Otega Oweh or Denzel Aberdeen were meant to get the ball instead, but Collin Chandler overthrew them both.

“The last play was not drawn for me. It was for Otega to get a shot at the middle of the court, or for [Denzel Aberdeen] to at least get it on the run, to get one bounce and to get a shot off, and then Collin overthrew it, and then I just — I mean, to LSU, I became Odell Beckham, and I made the shot.”

Mark Pope told Tom Leach that Kam Williams was the one who had thrown the pass when they’d practiced the scenario before, but Chandler asked to do it instead. They wanted to get Oweh a look inside the three-point line, or at worst, a Denzel Aberdeen runner from halfcourt, but as the huddle broke, he pulled Malachi aside and told him that if he ended up with the ball, just to turn and shoot it.

“I told Malachi as we’re walking out, I’m like, hey, Malachi, these passes, you just can’t throw it short, and so, it’s like if this goes long, catch it, turn, shoot it. You’re gonna have time to be able to do it. Man, my gosh, how about a kid executing with poise? He didn’t run away from the shot. He owns the shot. Picture picture and we’re really fortunate to win it, and I’m happy for him and happy for our guys.”

Did Chandler call an audible when he saw how LSU lined up on defense? Pope hadn’t spoken to his player yet, but noted how the ball soared almost perfectly toward Moreno.

“I haven’t gotten with Collin yet. It might have ended up being a little side-winder. I haven’t watched the film yet, but it landed exactly where it needed to land.”

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Moreno’s play down the stretch is even more impressive when you consider he played with four fouls for most of the second half. He checked out after picking up that fourth foul at the 17:54 mark. He checked back in with 8:54 to go and played the rest of the game, scoring seven of his ten total points, including an and-one to pull Kentucky within four with 5:29 to go and a dunk to put Kentucky up by one with 2:24 remaining. And, of course, the final bucket to win it all.

Kentucky’s shots finally started falling in the second half, but the comeback really only started to take root when the Cats got stops on defense. Kentucky held LSU without a field goal in the final 3:29, which is every bit as important as the shots they made. Moreno was a huge part of that, playing physical defense without picking up his fifth foul.

“It definitely starts with defense,” Moreno said. “I think in the first half, we were almost trying to figure out what we could do to kind of figure out what they’re running on their offense. And I mean, credit to Coach [Alvin Brooks III], he told us to start switching everything because they were kind of hitting the short roll a lot. And we kind of figured it out. And then that’s how we started getting stops.

“And then the stops just led to the transition buckets, led to the transition threes. And then when we kept getting stops. We were able to slow the game down to our pace, so when we got in the halfcourt, we could run our sets and start getting everybody open. And we ran the same play about five times, and we got to open three almost every time. So I think the defense led to our offense tonight.”

The Cats trailed by as many as 18 in the first half, which ties this with Kentucky’s comeback vs. Gonzaga last season as the biggest in the Mark Pope era. Moreno being Moreno, he made sure to give his teammates plenty of credit for fighting back after an abysmal first half.

“Yeah, I made the shot, but I mean, that doesn’t happen if we don’t come out with the same intensity we had in the second half. So I mean, we stepped it up in the second half. We made plays for each other, making that one extra pass, and we started knocking out shots. So I think that led to that shot.”

And what a shot it was. Even if it was a broken play, it looked pretty perfect to me.