LAHAINA, Hawaii — There was no signature moment, no singular play that proved Auburn is the best college basketball team in the country.
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Death by a thousand papercuts is how Auburn coach Bruce Pearl prefers his team to play. It’s wave after wave — fitting, given this week’s locale — of different types of talents, all of them perfectly square puzzle pieces that complement one another and need no set order to fit together. Then you put the apparent best individual player in the country, All-American center Johni Broome, in orange and blue, too?
Well, you get No. 4 Auburn winning 90-76 over Memphis in Wednesday’s Maui Invitational championship game.
This one win is only the cherry on top of a three-day confirmation, or coronation, that the Tigers are as good as any team in the country. Kansas beat Duke this week to remain undefeated, and it’s tough to demote an unbeaten blue blood from the top spot. Auburn has as good a case as any, having won three top-12 games in the first month of the season for the first time in program history.
If casual college hoops fans didn’t know Broome’s name before, they certainly do now. En route to earning tournament MVP honors, Auburn’s big man — whose tip-in with under two seconds left against No. 5 Iowa State completed the Tigers’ comeback win, who nearly had 20 and 20 against No. 12 North Carolina in the semifinals — saved his best for last: 21 points, 16 rebounds, six assists, four blocks and one steal.
“The Player of the Year doesn’t really matter to me,” Broome said, holding his wooden ball-shaped MVP trophy. “I care about winning.”
Still, a masterpiece marvelously done by Auburn’s maestro.
Early work for 4👌 pic.twitter.com/bVgmcfxlvw
— Auburn Basketball (@AuburnMBB) November 27, 2024
“I believe,” Pearl said, “we’ve got the best front line in college basketball.”
It’s hard to argue with him. No forensics expert is needed to confirm Broome’s fingerprints all over Auburn’s win, straight from the jump. The game was always in the palms of his oversized hands. On the opening possession, the 6-foot-10 graduate stroked the first of his two three-pointers and broke out the celebration he has all week — thumb and pinky out, shaking his hand aloha-style — jogging backward down the court.
Two possessions later and posted up on the block with two Memphis defenders trapping him, Broome picked up his head — something he couldn’t always do when he arrived on the Plains three seasons ago — and dished out the first of his five first-half assists (which tied his season-high) to a cutting Miles Kelly; he eventually finished with six dimes, one off his career-high of seven.
Broome got it done defensively, too, stuffing Memphis’ de-facto MVP Tyrese Hunter on an early turnaround jumper, for one of his three first-half blocks.
So, yeah, Broome was critical to Auburn’s 11-2 lead barely four minutes in.
“You let a team get out 9-0 on you, that’s the No. 4 team in the nation,” Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said, “you can’t recover from that.”
Even worse news for Memphis? Pearl’s team is much more than just Broome. It’s a lot like the crashing Pacific: coming in waves, neverending and pulling you back down the second you think you’ve found your footing.
Four other Tigers — Dylan Cardwell, Chas Baker-Mazara, Denver Jones and Chaney Johnson — had at least five first-half points. And fitting with Pearl’s larger stylistic preference, eight different players saw at least five first-half minutes. The 6-foot-11 Cardwell, who had scored four points combined thus far in Hawaii, is perhaps the best example of that ideology; the fifth-year center broke out for 18 points and six assists — both career-highs — while benefitting from Broome’s broader gravity.
“It’s a blessing to have him on my team,” Cardwell said of his frontcourt mate.
7 for 7🤫 pic.twitter.com/DtnI205shc
— Auburn Basketball (@AuburnMBB) November 27, 2024
Meanwhile, Memphis — which has been the surprise of this tournament and upended No. 2 UConn on Monday before toppling Tom Izzo and Michigan State on Tuesday — would’ve been lost if not for leading scorer PJ Haggerty, whose 15 at the break constituted nearly half of the Tigers’ total scoring efforts. There is one stat that speaks both to Auburn’s excellence and Memphis’ frustration. Hunter, who made 12 3-pointers the last two days, went scoreless in the game’s first 20 minutes; his first field goal didn’t come until three and a half minutes post intermission when he made one of the falling-away treys he’s seemingly mastered here in Maui.
“Me being a basketball player that played at the highest level, I understood what they were going to do to PJ and Tyrese. They were going to make it hard,” Hardaway said. “Why wouldn’t you, when those were the two hottest guys in the tournament?”
If not for Pearl earning a technical foul with under a minute left in the first half — which gifted Memphis guard Colby Rogers four free free-throws — then Auburn’s halftime lead would’ve easily been 20-plus, instead of only 16. Not that a 47-31 deficit was anything Memphis, or any team in attendance of the tournament’s 40th anniversary, was capable of making, anyway.
And without skating right over the second half, what more is there to say? Memphis never got things within 13 after intermission. Hardaway’s Tigers finished the game shooting 50 percent overall and 67 percent from 3 — and still got clobbered. Broome’s drive-and-dunk with 3:17 to play put Auburn up 21, and his punching that one down was as final a punctuation point as any. It was just a matter of the final margin from there.
Although, does the exact margin matter?
“Those guys have paid their dues and they’ve gone through their bumps and bruises,” Hardaway said. “They came to win today, and we just couldn’t overcome that.”
That wasn’t just a Memphis problem, though. The same affliction also befell Iowa State, North Carolina, and before this tournament, Houston. No one has had a solution so far and a way to slow down Pearl’s Tigers. Duke gets the next crack — maybe home-court advantage inside Cameron Indoor will be of some assistance — but with a top-five offense and defense, there aren’t many flaws Auburn’s foes can exploit.
Instead, for three straight days, Auburn made its case as the country’s top team, behind Broome and his ballyhooed supporting cast. It was the dominant team here in Hawaii, at least, in a field that featured four top-12 sides.
And now? Auburn will be a deserved Final Four frontrunner as it flies home. Five teams have won the Maui Invitational and gone on to win the national championship — and after this week, Auburn fans are rightfully dreaming they could be the sixth.
“Obviously, Maui is a prize,” Pearl said. “This has been a great springboard, but the confidence that we’re going to get from this is we know we can play with anybody. … If we stay healthy, (if) we continue to get God’s blessing, we’ll be in position.”
What makes Auburn so tough to beat?
Broome is one of the toughest individual covers in the sport and a legitimate stretch center who also protects the rim on the other end. He’s a matchup nightmare. The rest of Auburn’s roster fits so well around him, giving Pearl umpteen different combinations. He can play Broome at the five alone, at the four alongside Cardwell — or even sit both and play the 6-foot-7 Baker-Mazara in spot minutes at the 5.
It’s the same deal in the backcourt. JP Pegues led Furman past Virginia in the NCAA Tournament two years ago, but has struggled so far this season since up-transferring to the SEC — and yet Pearl can afford to be patient with him since he also has five-star Taahad Pettiford, lockdown defender Denver Jones and Georgia Tech transfer Miles Kelley. That doesn’t even factor in Chaney Johnson and Chris Moore as do-everything wing guys, who take Auburn’s physicality up another notch.
Defensively, perhaps the most impressive thing about the Tigers is how they take opponents out of their offense. After the Memphis win, Auburn tops nationally in defensive assist rate, meaning opponents struggle to share the ball more against Pearl’s team than any other. (Memphis only had seven assists against 11 turnovers on 28 made shots.) Between that, the Tigers’ defensive rebounding, and their length on the wings and in the frontcourt, it’s hard for other teams to get any easy looks. The gauntlet of the SEC will test that theory, and the Tigers won’t realistically go undefeated. It looks like it’ll take a nuclear shooting night to down this team.
Required reading
(Photo: Darryl Oumi / Getty Images)
