March Memories: Wake Forest Victory Deemed Best College Basketball Game Ever Played in Cleveland
March 20, 2020 02:30 PM | Men's Basketball, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – If Mike Gansey had made his free throw with 21 seconds left in regulation, Tyrone Sally is the player everyone would have probably most associated with West Virginia's 2005 NCAA Tournament upset victory over Wake Forest - a contest later called the "greatest college basketball game ever played in Cleveland" by popular sports columnist Bill Livingston.
After re-watching the full game on YouTube a couple of days ago, it's hard to argue with him. It was an amazing college basketball contest filled with drama and suspense right up until the moment Johannes Herber broke free for an uncontested layup with 13 seconds left in the second overtime.
Herber's score put West Virginia ahead by seven, but just as a decapitated rattlesnake will sometimes spasm and strike, Wake Forest's Taron Downey struck for one final fleeting 3 requiring Gansey to step to the free throw line once more to finally end it.
This time he did.
More than three hours and two overtimes after the game began, the scoreboard read West Virginia 111, Wake Forest 105.
The game's prettiest play came with 1:04 left in regulation when backup center D'or Fischer bounced a perfect pass to Sally for a backdoor dunk that gave West Virginia a 73-72 lead – the Mountaineers' first since early in the first half.
LeBron James, then in his second season with the Cleveland Cavaliers, was sitting in the stands that night watching his buddy Chris Paul play and wondering if the game was ever going to end.
"It was crazy, neither team could stop the other," King James once recalled.
It was a back-and-forth game with one team matching the other's score.
That was after halftime. In the first half, it was more a matter of West Virginia not being able to stop the Demon Deacons.
By the 10-minute mark, Wake had taken control of the game with the best player on the floor, Paul, a future 10-time NBA All-Star, dominating the perimeter and 6-foot-9, 291-pound center Eric Williams ruling the paint.
Paul easily got through coach John Beilein's tricky 1-3-1 zone defense to get an open look or pass the ball to Williams standing close to the basket. Once Williams had the ball, all he had to do was turn around and stuff it through the cylinder as hard as he could.
And he did it time after time after time.
"I thought he was going to end up with 30 or 35 points," Gansey recalled earlier this week.
West Virginia's 6-foot-11, 3-point shooting phenomenon Kevin Pittsnogle wasn't capable of slowing down Williams, and he wasn't getting off enough 3s to neutralize the 2s he was giving up, so Beilein needed to come up with a solution – quickly.
His answer was to replace Pittsnogle with Fischer. Wake Forest's biggest lead of the game came with six minutes left in the first half when a Paul jumper made it 31-17, and each time West Virginia scored a basket the Demon Deacons quickly answered.
It was about to happen again near halftime when Williams got the ball close to the basket ready to score, except this time Fischer was standing there to finally put up some resistance. D'or sent Williams' short turnaround shot right back at him and for the first time the West Virginia players felt like he could be stopped.
You could see it by the way the guys reacted on the bench, which just happened to be a bench full of future college coaches, basketball executives and lifelong hoop junkies.
They knew.
"That West Virginia team had an incredible acumen for the game," Beilein later said. "Pound for pound, inch for inch, those guys had the highest basketball IQ I had ever seen. We could adjust in games."
Beilein made a couple of great halftime adjustments. Offensively, instead of getting trapped with the ball on the wings where Wake Forest's quickness really bothered West Virginia's ball handlers, Beilein instructed his wing players to take the ball to the basket.
On the first offensive possession of the second half, Beilein ran Gansey off a little curl toward the foul line where he took the ball straight to the rim and scored a traditional three-point play. On the defensive end, alterations were made to 1-3-1 to compensate for Paul's exceptional quickness.
"A lot of credit goes to (former assistant coach) Jeff Neubauer because he was the one who kind of tweaked our 1-3-1; if we were going to play straight up, then Paul was just going to go right by us, and it was always going to be five on four," Gansey recalled. "We were just getting torched in the first half, but in the second half we had a much better plan of playing off of him a little bit more."
Soon, a 10-point Wake Forest lead had dwindled to seven, then to five, and then to three when Patrick Beilein hit a pretty jumper falling away from the basket.
Wake got its lead back to eight when Jamaal Levy scored with 7:05 left, but Herber, having to spend most of his time handling the basketball in the second half when starting point guard J.D. Collins picked up his fourth foul, answered with a big 3.
The free throw line, where West Virginia made 30 of 39 for the game, helped the Mountaineers get the lead down to four, and then Herber's driving layup with 3:38 left made it a two-point game.
Sally's backdoor dunk finally gave West Virginia its first lead of the second half, and two Collins free throws grew West Virginia's lead to three with 37 seconds showing on the clock.
But Gansey's miss 16 seconds later kept it from being a two-possession lead, and Downey's clutch 3 tied the game at 77 with 14 seconds left. Collins' driving layup attempt to win it in regulation bounced off the side of the rim, and Williams grabbed the rebound to keep West Virginia from attempting a follow up.
The first overtime saw both teams produce a combined 32 points. West Virginia scored four quick ones and then Wake answered. The foul line once again helped the Mountaineers to a three-point advantage with 22 seconds remaining, but Downey once again drilled a 3 to tie the game at 93 leading to a second extra session.
The game's breaking point came during a 10-second flurry in the second overtime when Paul picked up fouls No. 4 and 5.
Paul's final foul put Gansey back to the line where he made both to give West Virginia a six-point cushion. The margin got to eight on two Darris Nichols free throws, but Downey wasn't done, hitting a layup and yet another 3 after a Herber free throw made it a four-point game.
A Frank Young charity, followed by a rare Downey miss from behind the arc preceded the basketball ending up in Herber's hands with no one around him at the other end of the floor to deliver the dagger.
When the dust finally settled, Gansey had scored a game-high 29 points – 19 of those coming after regulation.
More than 300 friends and family had scrounged up tickets to see the Olmsted Falls, Ohio, resident play in Cleveland State's Wolstein Center – the place where his high school team lost to Tallmadge in the regional playoffs four years prior.
It was a night he will never forget.
"It seemed like everyone was going to foul out, and I think I had like one or two fouls, if that, and I'm thinking, 'How do I have enough energy to get through this game?'" he said.
Sally's 21 points came mostly during regulation before he fouled out late in the first overtime. The senior from Chesterfield, Virginia, native came close to playing a perfect game statistically, missing just one field goal attempt and hitting all five free throws while handing out four assists and grabbing four rebounds.
Fischer came off the bench to make 6-of-8 shots for 15 points, grab 10 boards and swatted three shots before also fouling out.
Eleven of Herber's 13 points came after halftime, all of them important ones when West Virginia was slicing into Wake Forest's lead.
And Collins, built more like a halfback than a college point guard, contributed 12 points despite having to constantly pick himself up off the floor after getting knocked down. Afterward, he looked like he had played a college football game as well.
All nine West Virginia players who got into the game contributed something to that great victory, even Nichols, then just a freshman, who was harassed by Paul to the point where Beilein had to have Herber do most of the ball handling in the second half when Collins picked up his fourth foul.
Interestingly enough, 15 years later, most of the West Virginia players are still involved in the game in some form. Beilein, Nichols and Young became college coaches, Gansey is now assistant general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Fischer is wrapping up a long and successful professional career overseas in Israel with plans of getting into the coaching profession. After playing professionally in Europe, Herber is now the managing director of an athletes' union in his native Germany.
Gansey said Collins is back in his native Houston doing personal workouts for aspiring young players while Sally is living in the Richmond area coaching AAU basketball.
Presently, Mike's job requires him to be on the road a lot scouting college players, and he was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a few years ago to evaluate Wake Forest forward Jaylen Hoard, now playing for the Portland Trailblazers.
He wasn't sure where the basketball practice facility was when he got on campus and he ended up running into a security guard overseeing the facility.
"Can I help you?" the guard asked.
"Yeah, I'm here to watch Wake Forest practice," Gansey said.
"You with the media?"
"No, I'm with the Cleveland Cavaliers," he answered.
"What's your name?"
"Mike Gansey."
"What? Mike Gansey from West Virginia? Ugh, I've hated you for years!" the guard said before waving him into the facility.
"That kind of made me feel good," Gansey laughed.
Gansey has also run into Paul, former Demon Deacon assistant Dino Gaudio, now working at Louisville, and others from Wake Forest that were involved in that game. They all frequently remind him the better team lost that night.
Five-on-five, it's hard to argue with them.
Six versus six or seven to seven, maybe.
But when the game eventually got down to players eight and nine, that's when West Virginia was able to win the greatest college basketball game anyone in Cleveland has ever seen.
"Our seven, eight and nine players were so good that any given night anyone could step up," Gansey said. "Clearly, D'or in the second half ... I remember in the game D'or saying, 'I've got (Williams). I've got him. I'll slow him down!'"
As for Paul, Gansey doesn't recall hearing anyone saying that about him.
"When Chris Paul fouled out, I knew we were going to win because he was the heart and soul of their team," Gansey said. "They were done."
They were.
Our next Mountaineer March Memories feature next Friday will profile West Virginia's great victory over Louisville at Freedom Hall to advance to the 1959 national championship game.
After re-watching the full game on YouTube a couple of days ago, it's hard to argue with him. It was an amazing college basketball contest filled with drama and suspense right up until the moment Johannes Herber broke free for an uncontested layup with 13 seconds left in the second overtime.
Herber's score put West Virginia ahead by seven, but just as a decapitated rattlesnake will sometimes spasm and strike, Wake Forest's Taron Downey struck for one final fleeting 3 requiring Gansey to step to the free throw line once more to finally end it.
This time he did.
More than three hours and two overtimes after the game began, the scoreboard read West Virginia 111, Wake Forest 105.
The game's prettiest play came with 1:04 left in regulation when backup center D'or Fischer bounced a perfect pass to Sally for a backdoor dunk that gave West Virginia a 73-72 lead – the Mountaineers' first since early in the first half.LeBron James, then in his second season with the Cleveland Cavaliers, was sitting in the stands that night watching his buddy Chris Paul play and wondering if the game was ever going to end.
"It was crazy, neither team could stop the other," King James once recalled.
It was a back-and-forth game with one team matching the other's score.
That was after halftime. In the first half, it was more a matter of West Virginia not being able to stop the Demon Deacons.
By the 10-minute mark, Wake had taken control of the game with the best player on the floor, Paul, a future 10-time NBA All-Star, dominating the perimeter and 6-foot-9, 291-pound center Eric Williams ruling the paint.
Paul easily got through coach John Beilein's tricky 1-3-1 zone defense to get an open look or pass the ball to Williams standing close to the basket. Once Williams had the ball, all he had to do was turn around and stuff it through the cylinder as hard as he could.
And he did it time after time after time.
"I thought he was going to end up with 30 or 35 points," Gansey recalled earlier this week.
West Virginia's 6-foot-11, 3-point shooting phenomenon Kevin Pittsnogle wasn't capable of slowing down Williams, and he wasn't getting off enough 3s to neutralize the 2s he was giving up, so Beilein needed to come up with a solution – quickly.
His answer was to replace Pittsnogle with Fischer. Wake Forest's biggest lead of the game came with six minutes left in the first half when a Paul jumper made it 31-17, and each time West Virginia scored a basket the Demon Deacons quickly answered.
It was about to happen again near halftime when Williams got the ball close to the basket ready to score, except this time Fischer was standing there to finally put up some resistance. D'or sent Williams' short turnaround shot right back at him and for the first time the West Virginia players felt like he could be stopped.
You could see it by the way the guys reacted on the bench, which just happened to be a bench full of future college coaches, basketball executives and lifelong hoop junkies.
They knew.
"That West Virginia team had an incredible acumen for the game," Beilein later said. "Pound for pound, inch for inch, those guys had the highest basketball IQ I had ever seen. We could adjust in games."
Beilein made a couple of great halftime adjustments. Offensively, instead of getting trapped with the ball on the wings where Wake Forest's quickness really bothered West Virginia's ball handlers, Beilein instructed his wing players to take the ball to the basket.
On the first offensive possession of the second half, Beilein ran Gansey off a little curl toward the foul line where he took the ball straight to the rim and scored a traditional three-point play. On the defensive end, alterations were made to 1-3-1 to compensate for Paul's exceptional quickness."A lot of credit goes to (former assistant coach) Jeff Neubauer because he was the one who kind of tweaked our 1-3-1; if we were going to play straight up, then Paul was just going to go right by us, and it was always going to be five on four," Gansey recalled. "We were just getting torched in the first half, but in the second half we had a much better plan of playing off of him a little bit more."
Soon, a 10-point Wake Forest lead had dwindled to seven, then to five, and then to three when Patrick Beilein hit a pretty jumper falling away from the basket.
Wake got its lead back to eight when Jamaal Levy scored with 7:05 left, but Herber, having to spend most of his time handling the basketball in the second half when starting point guard J.D. Collins picked up his fourth foul, answered with a big 3.
The free throw line, where West Virginia made 30 of 39 for the game, helped the Mountaineers get the lead down to four, and then Herber's driving layup with 3:38 left made it a two-point game.
Sally's backdoor dunk finally gave West Virginia its first lead of the second half, and two Collins free throws grew West Virginia's lead to three with 37 seconds showing on the clock.
But Gansey's miss 16 seconds later kept it from being a two-possession lead, and Downey's clutch 3 tied the game at 77 with 14 seconds left. Collins' driving layup attempt to win it in regulation bounced off the side of the rim, and Williams grabbed the rebound to keep West Virginia from attempting a follow up.
The first overtime saw both teams produce a combined 32 points. West Virginia scored four quick ones and then Wake answered. The foul line once again helped the Mountaineers to a three-point advantage with 22 seconds remaining, but Downey once again drilled a 3 to tie the game at 93 leading to a second extra session.
The game's breaking point came during a 10-second flurry in the second overtime when Paul picked up fouls No. 4 and 5.
Paul's final foul put Gansey back to the line where he made both to give West Virginia a six-point cushion. The margin got to eight on two Darris Nichols free throws, but Downey wasn't done, hitting a layup and yet another 3 after a Herber free throw made it a four-point game.
A Frank Young charity, followed by a rare Downey miss from behind the arc preceded the basketball ending up in Herber's hands with no one around him at the other end of the floor to deliver the dagger.
When the dust finally settled, Gansey had scored a game-high 29 points – 19 of those coming after regulation.
More than 300 friends and family had scrounged up tickets to see the Olmsted Falls, Ohio, resident play in Cleveland State's Wolstein Center – the place where his high school team lost to Tallmadge in the regional playoffs four years prior.
It was a night he will never forget.
"It seemed like everyone was going to foul out, and I think I had like one or two fouls, if that, and I'm thinking, 'How do I have enough energy to get through this game?'" he said.
Sally's 21 points came mostly during regulation before he fouled out late in the first overtime. The senior from Chesterfield, Virginia, native came close to playing a perfect game statistically, missing just one field goal attempt and hitting all five free throws while handing out four assists and grabbing four rebounds.
Fischer came off the bench to make 6-of-8 shots for 15 points, grab 10 boards and swatted three shots before also fouling out.
Eleven of Herber's 13 points came after halftime, all of them important ones when West Virginia was slicing into Wake Forest's lead.
And Collins, built more like a halfback than a college point guard, contributed 12 points despite having to constantly pick himself up off the floor after getting knocked down. Afterward, he looked like he had played a college football game as well.
All nine West Virginia players who got into the game contributed something to that great victory, even Nichols, then just a freshman, who was harassed by Paul to the point where Beilein had to have Herber do most of the ball handling in the second half when Collins picked up his fourth foul.
Interestingly enough, 15 years later, most of the West Virginia players are still involved in the game in some form. Beilein, Nichols and Young became college coaches, Gansey is now assistant general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Fischer is wrapping up a long and successful professional career overseas in Israel with plans of getting into the coaching profession. After playing professionally in Europe, Herber is now the managing director of an athletes' union in his native Germany.Gansey said Collins is back in his native Houston doing personal workouts for aspiring young players while Sally is living in the Richmond area coaching AAU basketball.
Presently, Mike's job requires him to be on the road a lot scouting college players, and he was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a few years ago to evaluate Wake Forest forward Jaylen Hoard, now playing for the Portland Trailblazers.
He wasn't sure where the basketball practice facility was when he got on campus and he ended up running into a security guard overseeing the facility.
"Can I help you?" the guard asked.
"Yeah, I'm here to watch Wake Forest practice," Gansey said.
"You with the media?"
"No, I'm with the Cleveland Cavaliers," he answered.
"What's your name?"
"Mike Gansey."
"What? Mike Gansey from West Virginia? Ugh, I've hated you for years!" the guard said before waving him into the facility.
"That kind of made me feel good," Gansey laughed.
Gansey has also run into Paul, former Demon Deacon assistant Dino Gaudio, now working at Louisville, and others from Wake Forest that were involved in that game. They all frequently remind him the better team lost that night.
Five-on-five, it's hard to argue with them.
Six versus six or seven to seven, maybe.
But when the game eventually got down to players eight and nine, that's when West Virginia was able to win the greatest college basketball game anyone in Cleveland has ever seen.
"Our seven, eight and nine players were so good that any given night anyone could step up," Gansey said. "Clearly, D'or in the second half ... I remember in the game D'or saying, 'I've got (Williams). I've got him. I'll slow him down!'"
As for Paul, Gansey doesn't recall hearing anyone saying that about him.
"When Chris Paul fouled out, I knew we were going to win because he was the heart and soul of their team," Gansey said. "They were done."
They were.
Our next Mountaineer March Memories feature next Friday will profile West Virginia's great victory over Louisville at Freedom Hall to advance to the 1959 national championship game.
TV Highlights: WVU 74, UCF 67
Saturday, February 14
Ross Hodge | UCF Postgame
Saturday, February 14
United Bank Playbook: UCF Preview
Friday, February 13
Ross Hodge | UCF Preview
Thursday, February 12
