Leonard Hamilton explains why he didn’t call timeout ahead of game-winner

Down 84-82 to Miami with just 4.9 seconds left, Leonard Hamilton could have called timeout to draw up a play to get a good potential game-winner. Instead, he let his Florida State team play out the final nearly five seconds.

It proved to be a great decision. Matthew Cleveland hit a buzzer-beating long-range jumper to win the game for the Seminoles, who have had a disspointing season overall.

“We work on last second shots all the time,” Hamilton said after the game in his press conference about the game-winner. “It didn’t make sense for us to to call a timeout because you would have given them an opportunity to set the defense. We play off of that. Believe it or not, we work on half court long shots every day. It’s kind of the fun part of practice where we have guys come across half court putting up those shots. We do it all the time.”

After Jordan Miller hit a 3-pointer from the corner to put the Hurricanes up, Cleveland inbounded the ball to Jalen Warley with 4.9 seconds left. Warley dribbled up the court and, as he was about to pass half court, passed the ball back to Cleveland. Cleveland took a dribble out to his right, gathered the ball and pulled up before time expired for a deep, high-arcing 3-point.

The shot swished through the net as pure as water from a glacier.

“Matthew has a focus,” Hamilton said. “I thought his body language, his energy. Our kids fed off his energy. He had a different look in his eye. We missed it the last two games. I didn’t know he was gonna play until yesterday. Caleb Mills when looking under the weather. This is kind of who we are. Everything that could go wrong this year, we dealing with it. I think we learning from it. We’re growing from the challenge that we had. What we did in the last few minutes was what we worked on an awful lot. 4.6 seconds I think was on the clock I believe. It didn’t make sense to try and take the ball out and give them a chance to set the defense.”

Cleveland and Darin Green Jr. each finished with a team-high 20 points and five rebounds to lead the Seminoles.