The setting was really nice. Tournament nice.
Dickies Arena opened for basketball Friday night with all the trappings, clean and sparkly to welcome TCU and USC for first-game honors. New court, new sightlines, new everything.
You could almost picture March.
For any team with NCAA aspirations, it’s a useful exercise. Postseason ball is played in arenas, on neutral courts in, for most, unfamiliar settings. Why not get used to it?
“It’s a big stage. I’ve been playing on a big stage for four years now so it’s nothing new to me,” TCU senior Desmond Bane said. “The young guys were definitely fired up. I just feel like we came out a little too slow.”
Slow? Oh yeah, the game. The game is why everybody got dressed up. The reason for the showcase game of the non-conference season.
In that respect, the Horned Frogs were a little late to the party. Down by 13 at halftime, their deficit became 18 not long after. They weren’t exactly doing their part in the introductory festivities for the $540 million facility.
But basketball being what it is — a game of runs — the Frogs came steadily, intently, purposefully back. Edrick Dennis’ 3-pointer and his drive out of a timeout cut the lead to three just after the 10-minute mark, and it stayed in that neighborhood until two free throws from the senior made it a two-point game with 18.7 seconds, and Dickies showed its lungs.
Then Kevin Samuel tied it with a lay-in off a driving feed from RJ Nembhard, drawing a foul and so going to the line to shoot for the lead with eight seconds left and the crowd on its feet.
This is March. Felt like it.
Then the sophomore center did what you can’t do in March. He missed his free throw. USC came down with the rebound, the Frogs tried to stop the ball with three players, got out-positioned for a rebound, and Nick Rakocevic’s tip-in with 0.2 seconds left won it, 80-78, for USC.
No matter the setting, no matter the time of year, basketball is basketball. A young TCU team, now 6-2, is learning.
“This is a lot of these guys’ first time being in those situations,” said Bane, the only four-year player on the team, a veteran of two NIT trips to New York City and an NCAA Tournament appearance, plus three Big 12 tournaments and 54 regular-season league games. “So we’ve got to grow from it, learn from it, and come back stronger. We’ve got resiliency, that’s for sure. Everybody’s fighting and battling, crawling and scratching. That’s a start for sure. We’ll build off of it.”
From December, lessons can spring all year. The Frogs, naturally, must turn the page quickly. But they can use this game, and the game two weeks ago against Clemson in which they lost a 15-point lead over the last seven minutes and fell in overtime, as a reference point for closing out games and finishing comebacks.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be a one-moment thing,” coach Jamie Dixon said. “I think it’s going to be more about what we have to take away, what we talk about going into a game and taking that away. We’ve got too many guys that you tell them something, they don’t get it right away … especially on the defensive end. I just don’t think that we carried out what we wanted to do, what we did in the scouting report, what we did in the walk-through, what we did in the two days we had to prepare.”
TCU knew it was fielding a young team that nearly churned its entire roster, leaving only Bane, Nembhard and Samuel as returning regulars. Yet an 8-0 start now seems like it was not that far out of reach at all.
“With a young team, with a new team, I knew we were going to hit adversity at some point,” Bane said. “It came a little earlier than I would have liked it to, for sure. But we’ll respond, and we’ll get better. I feel like it’s good that we’re being tested like this. We’ve lost to two good teams by a combined four points. It’s nothing really to hang your head about. We’ve just got to get better, keep improving.”
Two more chances for that come this week, against Winthrop and Lamar. Then, on Dec. 22, a biggie — Xavier at Schollmaier Arena.
It’s a nice place, too. It’ll be hosting won’t be hosting men’s NCAA Tournaments games in 2022, and it felt like it. The Frogs can use all the March-like experiences they can get.
“It’s an honor to be here for the first game,” Dixon said of Dickies. “It’s something that’s going to be great for Fort Worth and for our program, because we intend to play here — and play better when we do — going forward.”
You could get used to that.
