Hill’s rare shot keeps Vols from final

ATLANTA — Offense is not usually at the top of Arkansas senior center Steven Hill’s list of priorities. Despite standing seven feet tall, he usually spends most of his court time blocking shots or grabbing rebounds.

So no one was more surprised than Hill when Razorbacks point guard Gary Ervin passed the ball his way with less than seven seconds on the game clock and the Hogs trailing Tennessee 91-90 in their SEC tournament semifinal Saturday night.

But as Hill swiftly surveyed the situation, he also realized the Vols had covered up his other four teammates.

“And I knew the clock was running down,” he said later as he brushed his thick mop of light brown hair from his eyes. “So I kind of threw it up there and it went in.”

Shot from roughly seven feet out on the right baseline just over the outstretched fingers of Wayne Chism, the ball went through the net with 5.6 seconds to go, which meant there was plenty of time left for another Chris Lofton buzzer-beater. And the Volunteers’ star almost delivered. Unlike the 3-pointer he swished to beat South Carolina on Friday, however, Lofton’s 17-footer bounced away this time.

“It came out of his hands beautifully,” Arkansas coach John Pelphrey said of Lofton’s last launch. “I couldn’t believe it didn’t go in.”

And when it didn’t, the Razorbacks went hog wild over Hill.

“That might have been the coolest part of the whole thing, the way our team responded to Steven,” Pelphrey said. “Two seconds into the locker room, (Patrick) Beverly is jumping into his arms.”

The other teammates soon followed, mobbing a player who had missed his only other shot of the night and is averaging just 4.6 points a game for the season.

“That’s not really my go-to move,” Hill smiled. “But it went in.”

The Hogs appeared done in at the start of the SEC tournament. Just 2-6 on the road, they figured to struggle against a Vanderbilt team they had barely beaten at home and a Tennessee team that had buried them on the road.

But Arkansas calmly held off Vanderbilt on Friday and sent UT home short of the championship game for the 17th straight year.

“We didn’t front the post,” UT coach Bruce Pearl kept muttering in the postgame news conference, referring to playing in front of the Razorbacks’ taller inside players rather than behind them. “We wouldn’t front the post.”

In many ways, Hill was exactly who Pearl wanted to take the shot and who Pelphrey didn’t.

“If you’d told me before the game,” Pelphrey said, “that Steven Hill would take our final shot to win the game and Chris Lofton would take their final shot for the win, I might not have predicted this ending.”

Then again, no one could have predicted the endings in the Tornado Tourney, as the 2008 SEC event will forever be known. Georgia beat both Ole Miss and Kentucky on last-second shots. Alabama forced overtime against Mississippi State on a late shot and Lofton beat South Carolina.

But none of those may have been as surprising as Hill’s winner.

“Is this the biggest shot of my career?” he replied to a question. “I haven’t hit many shots in my career, period. So I’d say it is.”

Said Pearl for at least the fifth time: “We wouldn’t front the post.”