Tre Jones on His Game-Tying Buzzer Beater
Duke point guard Tre Jones had an incredible buzzer-beater to tie the Duke-Carolina game at the end of regulation, sending it to overtime. It’s one of those moments every basketball player imagines while growing up.
“A little bit. I didn’t dream about it – it was something I pictured in my head,” he said. “Coach (Krzyzewski) always talks about preparing for the moment, and that’s a moment I wanted to be in is hitting a big shot like that in a big game like this.”
Not surprisingly, the reality of hitting a shot like that was better than the fantasy.
“It’s always better when it happens yeah,” he said. “With Duke being my dream school since I could remember, always watching these rivalry games, seeing Austin Rivers hit a shot here when I was at one of my basketball tournaments going crazy, watching my brother do what he did against Carolina – I just wanted to add to that put my name in a game like that, and I feel like I might’ve done that today.”
The shot capped off a comeback from 13 points down in the final four-plus minutes of regulation.
“Down the stretch in the second half, we were down, I attacked a few times, got a couple good looks, and then for sure once we went into overtime, I knew we weren’t losing no matter what,” he said. “I airballed two shots. They got a couple of their looks back. They had the momentum, the crowd back into it. We were able to still just come back and answer. I think that just speaks on the team that we have, the work that we put in. We showed how young we were a little bit there in the first half, I think, but the way we just fought in the second half, I feel like we grew up tonight.”
“There’s really nothing to put into words,” he said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened tonight. It was a crazy game.”
