Waves Get Knocked Out by a Make-or-Break Effort

It’s the time of year when a season comes down to one game, and a game comes down to a few moments.

Those moments belonged to Wake Forest on Thursday. In the end, so did this first-round NCAA game that pushed the brake pedal on Pepperdine’s season.

One huge swing of momentum stood out to Pepperdine guard Devin Montgomery.

“72-70,” he said. “Three seconds left on the shot clock. They shoot a fadeaway jump shot, they get the rebound, get fouled, hit two free throws. That’s game, right there.”

“Yeah,” teammate Boomer Brazzle said. “That’s the one.”

Vytas Danelius’ free throws after he rebounded Craig Dawson’s miss pushed Wake Forest’s lead from two to four with 2:33 remaining. Pepperdine wouldn’t get a chance to tie again as Wake Forest squirted away for an 83-74 victory. It wasn’t a case of the team with the last shot winning. In this game of surges and stops, it would be the team with the last run.

The Demon Deacons had it all. A good plan of attack drawn up by Coach Skip Prosser. Solid point guard play by Broderick Hicks. Clutch shooting.

And the breaks.

“That’s basketball,” Pepperdine Coach Paul Westphal said.

In the first half, Darius Songaila made a jumper from the left wing that bounced off the far side of the rim and made its way back in. You could watch a whole season’s worth of games without seeing that play. It seemed so unlikely that it could have gone in without someone else tipping it that the teams were already back downcourt before the announcer felt confident enough to credit the basket to Songaila.

A forgiving rim? Not in the second half, when a Cedric Suitt layup on that same hoop managed to crawl out, leaving the Waves with a five-point deficit that quickly became eight on a three-point play by Jamaal Levy.

With 21/2 minutes left in the first half, Wake Forest benefited from a missed call by the officials. Dawson’s jump shot bounced high off the rim and hit the game and shot clock above the backboard. That should have given possession to Pepperdine, but the whistle didn’t blow and Wake Forest forward Antwan Scott alertly slammed the ball home as it came down.

“When it hit the clock, [the defender] just stopped,” Scott said. “I just kept looking at the ball. I saw it coming off. Coach just kept saying attack the glass, because they weren’t really a box-out team.”

Westphal screamed at the officials.

“I want a replay!” he said.

He was as upset as most outsiders have ever seen him. (“I’ve seen him upset at me in practice,” Montgomery said.) He called a timeout to harp on the officials some more. He delayed his halftime departure from the court so he could stare down the officials,

“They just said they didn’t see it,” Westphal said. “It’s astounding. I think it should be correctable. Your job is to get the call right. Everybody in the gym saw it. The shot clock was shaking when the ball hit it. They’ve got the other guy in a striped shirt [the official scorer] sitting at half court. If there’s not a mechanism in place to correct that call, there should be.”

Replays can be used only to determine the correct time, whether a shot is a three-pointer, or to determine the correct free-throw shooter.

“I love to see him fired up like that,” Suitt said. “We all should have been fired up like that the entire game, all 40 minutes. That would have made a big difference in the game, had we been.”

Pepperdine gave away the first 51/2 minutes of the game. The Waves showed no patience against Wake Forest’s zone defense, took bad shots and fell behind, 15-2.

“It took us a while to get adjusted to the tempo and the style of the game,” Brazzle said. “Everybody was probably a little nervous. It’s the NCAA tournament.”

And that’s probably what sparked the Waves to fight their way back into the game. They weren’t ready to go home. Montgomery could get into the paint at will, and he started to do so. The Waves began making the extra pass, finding the open man, knocking down three-pointers.

In the second half, they even made a slight adjustment to cut off the pass to the middle, which had been shredding their zone defense. They took the lead three times.

But they didn’t have a start-to-finish game plan that worked as well as Prosser’s. His team protected the ball (only nine turnovers) and hustled back on defense to limit Pepperdine’s fastbreak opportunities.

The score was more a product of good shooting than fast tempo.

“I sort of gave that up,” said Prosser, who’d rather play the game at NASCAR speed. “That’s just not our personality. It would be my personality, but I gave up being stubborn.”

Hicks had 15 points and seven assists and, as Westphal said, “he calmly dropped some threes on us that were really painful.”

Montgomery scored 18 points, but he should have penetrated more often. The opportunities were there for him, especially with Wake Forest playing so much man-to-man in the second half.

Who knows what Westphal said during the timeouts, but every time the Waves came out of one they either had a turnover or a bad shot.

Afterward, Westphal and his players kept talking about next year. They’ll be hard pressed to replace the defensive presence of Suitt, a senior who had four blocks and made the lane restricted air space for several other Wake Forest shots. But their top five scorers for the season (and this game) will be back.

They also need to retain their lesson from this game, when a team that wasn’t overwhelmingly superior just grabbed the opportunities that popped up.

“Some things are going to go their way,” Suitt said. “We proved that we were a good team. In the end, their better players outplayed us.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.