Luke Harangody’s college basketball career ended with a buzzer-beating putback, adding two more points to the total of the second-leading scorer in Notre Dame history.
It would have been fitting if everything else had not gone totally wrong for him.
For much of his career, Harangody was a scoring machine who frequently received little help from his teammates.
The roles were reversed by the time the sixth-seeded Fighting Irish (23-12) limped out of the New Orleans Arena on Thursday. Their season ended with a frustrating but hardly surprising 51-50 loss to No. 11 seed Old Dominion (27-8) in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Harangody, out of synch from the second he entered with 17:50 left in the first half, did not give his teammates enough help to prevent Notre Dame from going home.
Limited by foul trouble in the first half, he took one shot, and missed it. He tried six more in the second half before scoring his first points on a layup with 12 seconds left.
That’s right. The prolific shooter who entered with 2,472 career points went 39 minutes and 47 seconds without scoring. He finished with a season-low four points after averaging 22.4 points per game during the season.
“They played a good game, and I played a bad game,” Harangody said as he sat, forlornly, in front of his locker 20 minutes after his disappointing performance. “It was obviously not the way I foresaw it, but things happen.”
Few things have been stranger than what happened to Notre Dame in the latter part of the season.
Inexplicably, the Fighting Irish played better after Harangody suffered a bone bruise to his left knee in mid-February. While he sat out five games, the Fighting Irish morphed from a no-defense, fast-paced also-ran to a slow-down, defense-based contender. They lost at Louisville in overtime, then ripped off consecutive victories against Pittsburgh, Georgetown and Connecticut to go from the wrong side of the bubble to firmly in the field when Harangody returned for the regular-season finale against Marquette.
Squeezing the shot clock on almost every possession, Notre Dame held Pittsburgh to 53 points, Georgetown to 64 and Connecticut to 50. Only one opponent had scored fewer than 60 in the Fighting Irish’s ragged 17-8 start.
When the knee was ready, Harangody returned to a completely different system and with a totally different role. He came off the bench as Irish coach Mike Brey stuck with the plan that worked in his absence, and Notre Dame continued to win ugly, beating Marquette, 63-61, in overtime, holding Seton Hall to 56 points in the second round of the Big East tournament and Pittsburgh to 45 in the quarterfinals.
After shooting at least 12 times and scoring at least 14 points before the injury, Harangody shot fewer than 10 times in three of four games entering the NCAA tournament, including only six in Notre Dame’s 53-51 loss to West Virginia in the Big East tournament semifinals.
That counterintuitive plan almost worked again Thursday.
Notre Dame led, 15-6, early as Ben Hansbrough drilled two 3-pointers and Carleton Scott threw down a pair of dunks. Notre Dame led, 28-22, at the half even though Harangody picked up two fouls and played only seven minutes.
The Irish still led, 43-40, with 6:00 left, but to hold on, they needed at least a little offense from him.
He failed to deliver, missing a 3-pointer that would have broken a tie at 43 and a jumper that would have tied it at 48. Old Dominion went ahead for good on an awkward shot from Gerald Lee with 1:27 left and held on to win a snail’s pace game that provided a stark contrast to BYU’s wild 99-92 double-overtime victory over Florida occurring at the same time.
That would have been a Harangody-type game until his injury and Notre Dame’s dramatic style change.
“Coming back from an injury and coming into a whole new system has been difficult,” Harangody said. “I've tried to embrace it as much as possible, but at times, it has been difficult.
“I didn’t feel like my old self out there.”
Brey blamed Old Dominion’s 3-2 zone defense, which prevented Notre Dame from running plays for Harangody.
“He never really got into a flow, and when you play against zone for long periods of time, it’s harder to establish him offensively,” Brey said. “To beat a team that is going to sit in that, you’ve got to make some shots, two or three in a row to change the climate. We could never really do that.”
Harangody could not hit any shot until his late gimmees. He and the rest of the seniors won more games (93) than any class in Notre Dame history, but only one was in the NCAA tournament.
Two years ago, Harangody scored 18 and grabbed 14 rebounds as the fifth-seeded Fighting Irish clobbered George Mason in the first round. Two days later, he was 3-for-17 from the floor in a dismal 61-41 loss to Washington State.
At least he went out shooting then.
Against Old Dominion, he stood around and watched for the most part as Notre Dame matched its scoring low since that Washington State debacle.
Old Dominion, which was an 11-seed entering the tournament and won at Georgetown earlier this year, will play No. 3 seed Baylor, which beat Sam Houston State in the second game, on Saturday.
“Personally, it's not the way I wanted it to end, but I've had a great career,” Harangody said. “Right now it's hard to focus on the good things, but we made a good run.”
Maybe, but it ended all wrong.
Harangody’s first basket cut Notre Dame’s deficit to 49-48. His final bucket was meaningless, falling through the hoop as time ran out on the Fighting Irish’s season.
Instead of looking for an open 3-point shooter when he pulled down an offensive rebound with two seconds left, he looked for contact and an old-fashioned 3-point play.
“I was trying to draw a foul,” he said. “That was the only thing I could do.”
On this day, he couldn’t do much of anything.
