Tennessee Stages Yet Another Great Escape

Tennessee has been in so many championship situations, it doesn’t seem right to think of the Lady Vols as a team of destiny.

But the “D” word continues to define this particular title run for the Lady Vols. They won their third straight game with a second or less to play, ruining Southeastern Conference partner Louisiana State’s first visit to the Women’s Final Four on Sunday with a 52-50 victory in the New Orleans Arena.

The combined 102 points were the fewest scored by two teams in a Final Four game.

Tennessee (32-3) moves on to play in Tuesday’s championship game. And keeps doing so dramatically.

LSU (27-8), which led 25-19 at halftime and tied the score at 50 on a layup by Tillie Willis with 27 seconds to play, had the ball under the Tennessee basket with six seconds left. The ball was passed to Temeka Johnson. But the diminutive point guard, who struggled much of the night after getting kneed in her right thigh, ran into a Tennessee double team and lost the ball. Shyra Ely picked it up and fed it to a streaking LaToya Davis, who carefully banked in the winning basket with 1.6 seconds left.

“We wanted to double team Johnson once she got the ball in her hands,” said Davis, who scored 10 points and was one of three Tennessee players in double figures. “Once we did that we tried to contain her. Ashley [Robinson] was there to tip the ball, Shyra made the play and I scored at the end.”

“I told the team how proud I was of them, but I didn’t know how much more of this I could take,” Tennessee Coach Pat Summitt said.

“I thought this game would go down to the last two minutes, and it went down to the last six seconds.”

When asked if she could remember another stretch of games like this in tournament conditions, Summitt shook her head. “Not in 30 years,” she said. Now the Tigers know how Baylor and Stanford feel. Those teams were either tied with or ahead of Tennessee in the final seconds only to see the Lady Vols prevail.

LSU interim Coach Dana “Pokey” Chatman did her best to deflect blame from her players. “We hold them down offensively and only turn the ball over nine times. Bottom line, they had 18 second-chance points (to five for LSU). That’s the ball game. Not to minimize a valiant effort on Tennessee’s part -- the game was a slugfest of sorts -- but the bottom line was second-chance points. That’s where the game was lost.”

But Johnson, who scored eight points and handed out nine assists to set an NCAA tournament record for career assists (50), would have none of it.

“I just lost the ball I guess,” Johnson said. “I don’t know ... I apologize for not getting ball to Doneeka [Hodges] where she would have liked it. I just lost the ball; turnover on my part.”

Familiarity can breed contempt, but in the Final Four it usually breeds blowouts. Before Sunday there were four previous times when teams from the same conference met in the semifinals or finals, and the average margin of victory had been 20 points.

Tennessee was involved in three of those games, twice routing Georgia while the other time overpowering Arkansas. (The fourth game was Notre Dame beating Connecticut.)

But LSU came out strong defensively in the first half. The Lady Vols only made eight of 28 shots in the half (28.6%), and led only once, 6-5.

The 19 points scored by Tennessee were its second-lowest first-half total this season, and equaled the tournament Final Four record for fewest points in a half.

Seimone Augustus led the Tigers with 16 points but made only seven of 21 shots. Shanna Zolman led Tennessee with 12.