Even Shaquille O'Neal would have blushed if he saw how horribly the Buffalo Bulls shot their free throws on Tuesday night at Alumni Arena.
When one goes 11-25 from the free throw line (emphasis on "free"), it is bound to come back to haunt him or her.
And that it did, as UB fell to the Toledo Rockets (11-14, 5-10 Mid-American Conference) by a score of 66-59 in front of a small, but loud crowd that totaled 1,490.
"Forty-four percent, obviously the number one thing that we needed to do a better job at was our free throw shooting," Buffalo head coach Reggie Witherspoon said. "We chart every single free throw that we take in practice...I don't know that we ever had a practice where we shot 44 percent."
Despite their inefficiency from the line, Buffalo (4-20, 1-14 MAC) still played a solid game in almost every other aspect of play. In fact, they held the lead with 5:47 remaining on the clock after a Danny Gilbert 3-pointer put the Bulls up 57-54.
Much to UB's chagrin however, they would not score another field goal the rest of the way.
"If your not getting a field goal in the last five minutes, but your getting fouled, that's good," Witherspoon said. "Except if your shooting 44 percent from the line."
"I thought the last five minutes were similar to the first five in that we had point blank shots to the basket that we didn't convert," she said. "When that happened it seemed that the mind set of our players was that they started looking for something else, and you cant get much better than a point blank shot at the basket."
With the game still in the balance and the Bulls trailing by only 60-57, they still had a chance to pull out a win. But that is when Toledo's junior guard, Keith Triplett, set his sights, locked onto UB, and sent a dagger of a three-pointer straight into the heart of the Bulls and all of their fans with 53 seconds left on the clock.
"(Triplett) made some threes with guys on him," Witherspoon said. "It got to the stage of the game where you hand it off to your best players and they will your team to win...he just said 'you guys get on my back, I'm taking it.'"
That was the second time that Triplett, who scored 28 points on 7-13 shooting (4-5 from downtown), drained a morale killing three-pointer.
UB led 28-21 with 3:28 remaining in the first half. A 9-0 run however, culminating in a three-pointer courtesy of Triplett, would send the Rockets soaring high into the lockeroom for halftime.
"That gave us a big lift," Triplett said. "On the road, you don't want to go into halftime down."
"That was the good shot in the arm that we needed," Joplin said. "I think it kind of got (Triplett) on track also because then he knew he was shooting the ball decent from the outside."
Buffalo was carried by a big performance from their freshman guard Roderick Middleton, who chipped in 17 points, 13 in the second half. "Hot" Rod, as the UB fans call him, was just that in the second half, when he played a tremendous role in keeping the Bulls in the game.
"I just tried to come out there and be aggressive," Middleton said. "I tried to not worry about making mistakes, because they are going to happen. I just wanted to go out there and be aggressive."
The loss is the fourth in a row for UB and allowed Toledo to stop the bleeding in their own three-game losing streak. It was also their first road win since Dec. 30 at Michigan State and their first MAC road win of the season.
"We were really disappointed that we were coming up short," Joplin said. "If you want to think of every which way to lose, we were doing it. Its really tough when your losing like we have been losing...tonight we got some stops defensively, I think that was a big difference."
Buffalo will now head to Eastern Michigan for their March 3 match up against the only team they have beaten in their last 17 games.
