The St. John's Red Storm defeated the Kansas Jayhawks in the Round of 32 to advance to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1999. The victory came at the hands of junior guard Dylan Darling, who hit a buzzer-beating layup for the 67-65 win.
“I probably don't deserve this. I was pretty bad all night long, but my teammates held it down tonight. Everybody stepped up, including this dude right here,” Darling said of sophomore guard Ian Jackson. “And [I’m} just happy to keep this thing rolling.”
Darling did not perform well before that basket, going 0/4 from the field. Head coach Rick Pitino even joked that Darling was playing poorly after the game.
“Here's the amazing thing, and the funniest thing I've ever been involved with,” Pitino said during the postgame press conference. “So, we're going to run a play, but they’ve got fouls to give, and Bells (Dylan Darling) comes up to me and says, ‘Run power.’ Which is a high-back screen pick-and-roll. So, I walk away. I said, ‘Okay, power.’ I walk away and said, ‘Wait a second. He hasn't scored a bucket, and he wants to run a play for himself.’ And I'm thinking as I'm walking, I said, ‘But he's Bells.’ And not only did he do it, he went with his right hand. So real proud of him because to want the ball when you haven't made a shot is unbelievable.”
Interestingly, Darling didn't even know that he had sent the Red Storm to the Sweet 16. It wasn't until the crowd's reaction that he realized his shot was successful.
“To be honest, the ball left my hands, and I hit the ground, and I didn't even see the ball go in,” he explained. “I just heard everybody going crazy, and then, was jumping around. It was pretty cool, though.”
Darling was not the most likely candidate to be the Red Storm's hero. After all, he has only averaged 5.2 points per game since the start of the Big East Tournament. Then again, St. John's is 6-0 during that stretch.
“He’s just being himself,” Ian Jackson smiled. “I think he understood what time it was. He understood how much time was on the clock. He called for his own number after what he felt like was a bad night and pulled through for us. It was amazing.”
Meanwhile, the Jayhawks once again fell flat during March Madness. Ever since winning the 2022 Division I NCAA Tournament, Kansas has failed to advance to the Sweet 16 in each of the last four years.
“The tournament. One of the things that makes it so great is that it can be great, but it can also be cruel,” said Jayhawks head coach Bill Self during the team’s postgame press conference. “We obviously put ourselves in a position to play from behind the whole game and then really competed and played great down the stretch and just didn't finish what we had started down the stretch.”
Kansas had a plan for how it wanted to defend the last play of the game. Unfortunately for the Jayhawks, Darling made a spectacular basket.
“St. John's is a good team,” described KU senior guard Melvin Council Jr. “It was a great layup. If it was a ball screen, we would have switched it, but he rejected it.”
“Last play was a high pick-and-roll. Zuby’s a great screener. He's extremely fast. They probably were looking at him to go left. He went right,” Rick Pitino said. “It was the only play we could run, or you could try to throw it into the high-post area, [and] let Zuby go. But as soon as Bells said to me to run power, I knew he could get to the rim because he hadn't done a damn good thing the whole night. So, I knew he was going to do it.”
Because of that layup, St. John's has broken a 27-year curse and will be going to the Sweet 16, where they're set to face the top-seeded Duke Blue Devils. Tip-off for that one is set for 7:10 p.m. EDT on Friday.
