Late layup by High Point’s Chase Johnston is his first 2-pointer of the season – and it lifts the 12th-seeded Panthers past 5th-seeded Wisconsin and into the second round.For a guy in his sixth college season, at his third school, Chase Johnston found himself in an extremely unfamiliar position in what might have been the final seconds of his career: nothing at all between him and the game-winning basket.
That made it different from every single shot the High Point guard made to that point in the entire season.
Johnston’s twisting layup with 11 seconds to play to beat Wisconsin was his 68th basket of the year — and the first worth only two points.
Thirty games. His 142nd attempt. His first made 2-pointer after coming in on a season-long 0-of-4 slump inside the arc. The final bucket in an 83-82 upset of the fifth-seeded Badgers and High Point’s first-ever win over a power conference team.
What a time to make a layup.
“I was just like, ‘Just get this in the rim,’” Johnston said. “‘We can go shock the world if we do this.’”
Wisconsin’s Nick Boyd missed at the rim, trying to put the Badgers up three. High Point’s Rob Martin corralled the rebound. And Johnston already was sprinting across midcourt ahead of the defense.
“When Rob threw that up, I was like, ‘I got to put this in the hoop and win this game,’” Johnston said. “I wasn’t really thinking whether it was a 2 or a 3. I was just trying to put it in and win this game, so …”
They were the two most unusual of his 14 points Thursday, the other 12 coming on four makes from behind the line, which is how Johnston — a 6-foot-3 guard from Boca Raton, Fla. — usually gets on the scoresheet.
Johnston is a career 40 percent shooter from behind the arc, first at Stetson, then at Florida Gulf Coast and the past two seasons at High Point, where he hit 41.5 percent last season and is at 48.3 percent this season after going 4-of-6 against the Badgers — enough to pass Steph Curry for 22nd in NCAA history with 415.
He wasn’t always this way. His first few seasons, he made similar numbers of short- and long-range baskets, even if he always leaned toward the outside of the 3-point line. It was only when he arrived at High Point that he became a 3-point specialist, and after averaging double-digits at the start of his career, he averaged 6.9 points last season and is at 6.1 this season in a smaller role.
That wasn’t the only change for him. After starting all but one game last season for High Point and the first 11 games this season, Panthers coach Flynn Clayman — an assistant to Alan Huss, now an assistant at Creighton, a year ago — asked him to come off the bench.
“He’s been an all-conference player two times already before he came here, in the ASUN (Atlantic Sun Conference),” Clayman said. “They played at USC when he was at Florida Gulf Coast. He’s been doing this for a long time. We started this season 8-3. Got down to the nitty gritty of what we needed to do. At High Point, that’s not good enough for our standard.
“With how small we were at the point guard spot, I felt like I kind of mixed up our roster composition and I asked him to take a bench role because we were a little small starting games. His willingness to take that role and keep leading, at the end of the season to be doing what he’s doing, it speaks to how selfless these guys are.”
The Big South champion Panthers won all but one of their next 18 games, coming into Thursday on a 14-game winning streak that’s now 15. They lost to Purdue by 12 in the first round last season as a No. 13 seed. They got the job done this season as a No. 12 seed and now face the winner of fourth-seeded Arkansas and 13th-seeded Hawaii thanks to the biggest shot of Johnston’s season, even if it was the shortest.
“It’s such justice that he gets all this national attention for never making a 2-point shot all season,” Clayman said. “The first one he makes is to get us to this win in the NCAA Tournament.”
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