By PAUL GOTHAM
BUFFALO — The 22 turnovers Louisville men’s basketball committed on Thursday will be the statistic that stands out among others.
That the sixth-seeded Cardinals were able to survive despite those miscues, can be attributed to a run to start the second half.
Leading by 10 at the break, Louisville (24-10) scored on seven of its next nine possessions.
Ryan Conwell accounted for eight of his 18 points during the sequence.
“We made a big emphasis on just doing that,” Conwell said after Louisville’s 83-79 victory over No. 11 University of South Florida (USF) at the Key Bank Center. “Throughout the season, we would come out in the second half and have some slow starts, and we would kind of put ourselves in a hole. This time around we knew that everything’s on the line. Just come out in the second half, we had to play with even more intensity than we did in the first half to get the job done.”
Teammate Vangelis Zougris opened the scoring then Conwell added the next five points. After a Sananda Fru tap-in, Conwell connected on a 3-pointer then led J’Vonne Hadley into the open court for a layup.
The game hadn’t yet reached the first media timeout of the second half, and the Cards’ lead was 51-35.
“What we really talked about at halftime was we went through the major points of the game, or the bullet points that we said that were the huge keys,” said Louisville head coach Pat Kelsey. “We said transition, first and foremost, with these guys (USF). They’re one of the fastest-paced teams in the country. Their attack is extremely dangerous, and you can’t take plays off. We have to do that.
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“The second was they’re an elite rebounding team. All this stuff in preparation — rebounding, keeping them off the free-throw line.”
Conwell and Isaac McKneely hit back-to-back triples to extend the lead to 20 at 57-37.
Another McKneely 3 pushed the Louisville advantage to 62-39.
“Those guys were extremely attentive to those keys to the game, and that’s what got us off to a great start,” Kelsey said.
As prolific as that start was to the second half, the Cards were equally or at least nearly equal in futility later in the stanza.
Extending its defensive pressure over half court, USF forced seven miscues over a 10-possession stretch when the Cards were limited to one field goal.
“I think I know what we’re going to be doing in practice tomorrow for sure,” McKneely said. “Yeah, obviously got to clean that up. That was one of the points of emphasis going into the game was to win the turnover battle. Obviously I don’t think we won that.”
USF’s Joseph Pinion converted a layup and made it a six-point game at 78-72 with 1:37 remaining.
“It was the longest ten minutes of my life, there’s no question about it,” Kelsey said. “We haven’t played against a team like that, that has pressed us like that.”
Gavin Hightower finished a pair of drives to the basket, and Pinion hit a trey to highlight an 11-3 USF run.
“First of all, you credit them, you credit South Florida,” Kelsey said.” Like I said, their season was on the line. When you talk about a sense of desperation, that’s what I — it was a tsunami.”
The loss brought to a close a season for USF (25-9) in which the Bulls reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2012.
“Hat’s off to Louisville for winning the game,” said first-year head coach and Jamestown, New York native Bryan Hodgson. “Obviously they played better than we did today. They have a good coach. They have really good players. They’ve been good all year.
“We felt like coming in that we had a chance to beat them. We obviously did not play well. A big part of that is they did a great job guarding us, and we shot ourselves in the foot in the second half getting down 23. In the first half didn’t really put ourselves in a position to win the basketball game.”
Louisville will play either No. 3 Michigan State or No. 14 North Dakota State in the next round. That game will be played on Saturday.
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