Twenty years ago, Drew Nicholas authored one of the best moments in Maryland men’s basketball history with a buzzer-beating, game-winning 3-pointer against UNC Wilmington in the first round of the 2003 NCAA Tournament.
Turns out, the wheels started turning well in advance of that moment. Nicholas was about 10 years old watching Christian Laettner lift Duke over Kentucky with a buzzer-beating jumper in the Elite Eight of the 1992 NCAA Tournament.
“I don’t know why, but that was the beginning of my Duke dislike or hatred, if you want to call it [that],” Nicholas said on Glenn Clark Radio March 21. “But for whatever reason, I really wanted to see Kentucky win that game and Laettner hits that shot. That was the first night that I cried over basketball.”
Nicholas got a chance to face Duke plenty at Maryland from 1999-2003, when the Terps went 103-35 overall and won a national championship. The 6-foot-3, 160-pound guard averaged 8.8 points, 2.2 assists and 2.1 rebounds at Maryland but was used in a reserve role during his first three seasons.
Nicholas broke out as a senior in 2002-03, starting 31 games and averaging 17.8 points, 3.8 rebounds and 2.7 assists. The Terps entered the NCAA Tournament in 2003 as a No. 6 seed, having put together a 19-9 season to that point with wins against highly-ranked Duke and Wake Forest squads.
That led to a first-round matchup against No. 11 seed UNC Wilmington on March 21, 2003, in Nashville. Maryland was down, 73-72, with five seconds left in regulation. The Terps needed to go the length of the court and score out of a Seahawks timeout to extend their season. Nicholas took over from there:
“I remember I was going so fast trying to get up the court because I only had like five seconds to go the full length of the court,” Nicholas said. “I ended up weaving toward our bench and I knew I had to get a shot off. I jumped off of one leg. Considering when you’re jumping off of one leg and you’re running so fast, you know that the ball is going to move on you a little bit as you release it. I remember I shot it a little bit to the left and thank God enough, man, it ended up being bottoms.”
Nicholas totaled 1,221 points at Maryland, but that buzzer-beater was his signature moment — and is still remembered today as one of the great moments in NCAA Tournament history. Now the director of scouting for the Denver Nuggets, Nicholas is still asked about that shot to this day, at the age of 44.
“Obviously as time goes on, I think a little bit of it tends to fade, but there’s more than enough times where I’m introduced to somebody or I meet somebody for the first time and I give them my name and they all the sudden start to give me that strange look,” Nicholas said. “And then it all the sudden pops into their mind like, ‘Wait, you’re that guy that hit that shot in the NCAA Tournament?’ It still comes up. It’s still surreal, man, for me to be connected with such an iconic shot, I guess you would say, in Maryland history. I’m just so, so fortunate about it.”
In between his college hoops and scouting days, Nicholas enjoyed a successful career overseas. Along the way, he played against Tyus Edney in Italy. Edney can relate to Nicholas’ heroics, considering how he came through for his UCLA squad in 1995. Down by one point to Missouri with 4.8 seconds left in a second-round matchup, Edney needed to go the length of the court and score … and he did:
Nicholas defers to Edney in NCAA Tournament buzzer-beater lore.
“Probably better than mine and probably deserves to be higher up on the list considering he went the length of the floor and made a layup, that’s how quick he was,” Nicholas said. “And then they went on to win the national championship from it. We had a couple of moments, just kind of talking about being able to have a piece of March Madness history.”
For more from Nicholas, listen to the full interview here:
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Maryland Athletics