They all showed up Friday night at Savage Arena.
The national TV cameras. The students. The community.
And, most of all, the best basketball team in the Mid-American Conference.
If the Rockets had visions of a regular-season league title or an address on the bubble of the big dance, they vanished in an 88-82 loss to No. 25 Buffalo that felt less like a missed opportunity than a confirmation of what we already suspected.
Toledo is a good MAC team. Buffalo is a great one.
There is no shame in that. The Rockets did not step on themselves. They played hard and smart — with only nine turnovers — and led the league’s best team since Kent State in 2002 for the better part of 30 minutes.
“You saw two really good teams play really good basketball tonight,” Toledo coach Tod Kowalczyk said. “Anybody who saw that game couldn’t walk away disappointed.”
OK, I’m not sure that last part is true.
If Toledo was ever going to beat the Bulls, this was the night. It all lined up, from the standing-room-only crowd of 7,401— the biggest since Savage Arena was renovated in 2008 — to its hot start.
Something seemed in the air when Buffalo missed 10 of its first 11 shots, and in that same span Toledo big man Luke Knapke banked in a 3-pointer on one possession and Jaelan Sanford swished a twisting, double-pumping 3 to beat the shot clock on the next. The Rockets opened a 17-4 lead.
“They punched us in the mouth,” Buffalo coach Nate Oats said.
Yet Toledo never truly took advantage of its wobbled opponent.When Buffalo star CJ Massinburg went to the bench with 4:31 left in the first half, the Rockets led by nine, the place was rocking, and the hosts were primed to keep rolling. Instead, the opposite happened, the Bulls pulling within three by halftime.
Toledo paid dearly. Where Bowling Green matched the Bulls big shot for big shot in its upset win two weeks earlier, that was the exception. Play the what-if game all you want. Buffalo ultimately was too good. Too athletic (see: Montell McRae’s reel of alley-oop slams). Too tough (UB outrebounded Toledo 46-37). Too been-there-done-that clutch.
Never mind that the Rockets outshot Buffalo overall. When it mattered, the Bulls made the big plays, including four ugly-as-sin line-drive 3s by Nick Perkins that steadily vacuumed the air from the arena.
That’s what championship teams do.
Which the Rockets are not at the moment. Maybe that will change. Toledo should still finish among the top four teams that receive a bye to Cleveland for the league tournament, and the magic and beauty of March is you never know.
“We’ll see [Buffalo] again and we’ll get another crack at them,” Sanford said.
“We can beat them,” Kowalczyk said. “You just have to have very little margin of error. ... When it comes down to it, they made some tough shots in key moments. Sometimes you have to give them credit too.”
Still, for a Rockets team with many nice wins but still no signature ones, this was a reality check.
If Toledo can’t beat the Bulls in Buffalo and it can’t beat them in these conditions in Toledo, I don’t know what to tell you about Cleveland.
With a behemoth in the way, Friday night showed the Rockets are who they are, very good but likely with a familiar March ceiling.
First Published February 16, 2019, 5:44 a.m.
