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GREENVILLE, S.C. – This seems a relatively quiet town, when there’s not an NCAA Tournament game going on. And for a moment, it seemed all the excitement possible had been drained from this place through the previous 15 hours of March Madness staged at Bon Secours Wellness Arena.
We’d had Duke nearly lose to a 16 seed. We’d watched North Carolina blow a 19-point lead and be eliminated by a B-minus effort from VCU. This all had opened with TCU escaping Ohio State in one of those desperate 8/9 matchups.
And now Illinois was up a dozen points, VCU was playing better than it had even in advancing past North Carolina two days earlier without it really mattering, and the 10 p.m. hour approached. Sleep surely seemed an attractive option for nearly everyone in the building.
Then Big Z happened.
How much can one sequence in a sport with so much scoring change a game?
Goodness, what Illinois junior center Zvonimir Ivisic delivered in just a few short seconds changed everyone’s night, beyond merely advancing the Illini to a Sweet 16 matchup against No. 2 Houston with this 76-55 victory.
“I was going for that as soon as I started running,” Ivisic told The Sporting News. “I was like, screw it, I’m jumping.”
With a little less than 15 minutes left in the game, Illini forward Andrej Stojakovic missed a too-tough baseline layup. VCU’s Brandon Jennings grabbed the rebound and launched a break upcourt. He found streaking big man Lazar Djokovic, a product of Serbia, who advanced the ball, soared to the goal and attempted to throw down a righthanded dunk with Ivisic directly beneath the goal. Ivisic challenged, and Djokvic’s dunk caught the back of the rim and bounced clear to Illinois power forward Ben Humrichous.
He advanced it to guard Kylan Boswell, who approached the 3-point line with two options near the goal but spotted Ivisic sprinting angrily past midcourt. Boswell dropped it to Ivisic near the foul line. With two strides from there, he flew to the rim and hammered in a dunk.
It looks impressive on the video replay.
It felt life-changing from the adjacent sideline.
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Ivisic acknowledged to TSN there was a little something extra in the dunk but said, “I don’t like to talk about that … There definitely was. Something outside of basketball.”
Djokovic had said Friday he’d told VCU assistant coach Jimmy Martelli that he wanted to see Illinois in Greenville and he would be “hyped up” for the matchup. Ivisic acknowledged to another reporter he was aware what was said.
“From that moment,” he said, “we controlled the game the whole time.”
What had been a 12-point lead and could have been cut to 10 suddenly was 14. It was more than a 4-point swing. The Illinois lead was at 18 points inside 2 minutes. It never again was as close as before the dunk. The Rams had rallied from 19 down inside the final 10 minutes to force overtime and advance past North Carolina. There would be nothing like that here.
“One thing about Z, he loves like, the highlight play,” Boswell told The Sporting News. “So I’m running in transition and I see Dave and I see the guard, who’s in the 2-on-1, I don’t know if I should hit Dave or I should throw Andrej the lob.
“Me and (Z) have this like weird connection. I just happened to look behind at halfcourt and see him running down, so I decided to wait, and wait, and wait until he was up enough to get the ball. And I just dumped it to him. And I thought I gave it to him too soon, and I’m seeing him take off basically from the free throw line: one, two, almost from the free throw line and punch it – that was insane.”
You know how it’s common now to say a dunking player put an opponent on a poster? This wasn’t a poster for a kid’s bedroom wall. This was the kind of mural they paint onto the side of a building.
On the official play-by-play, it reads: “Made dunk by ILL 44 ivisic, Zvonimir, on The Fast Break”
Nah, that play deserves an entire Nick Hornby book, if Hornby happened to be into March Madness instead of Arsenal’s Premier League team.
“I’m going to be honest. I got the rebound, and I was a little tired,” Humrichous told TSN. “And I knew that if Z got the ball, he was going to jump as high as he could, touch the top of the backboard and then dunk it.
“What he does: That’s stuff that he does often, but it will never not amaze me. Even on the other end, was it him that blocked the shot?”
It wasn’t clear whether Ivisic got a hand on the ball, but his challenge impacted Djokovic’s attempt.
“We’ll give him the block,” Humrichous said. “He blocked it, the ball bounced my way, throw it up … I want him to take that every time. It’s a very high-level shot. Basically 100 percent efficiency.”
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