I agree that FT shooting wasn’t the only reason Memphis lost the game. There was also the fact that they got killed on the inside and Calipari’s curious decision to keep setting picks for Rose even when it wasn’t working and they didn’t need it early in the game. Calipari was granted a temporary reprieve on the latter when Bill Self went to the box-and-one.

That said, it’s hard to argue that Memphis would not have won the game if they had just hit their FTs down the stretch. It’s not even like I was expecting them to knock them down like Kobe in the last 2 minutes, but 1/5 is awful and the 4 misses looked bad (only Rose’s first one had a chance of going in). While Memphis certainly had the ball in the right players hands at the end of the game, it’s a sad state of affairs when your go-to guys barely shoot over 70% for the year. I’m not sure if Calipari just said “Screw it. We’ll blow people out so FTs won’t matter” and rolled the ball out on the court every day at practice because I don’t think he had any other choice, but to dismiss his team’s Achilles heel in the media. With guys that can hit from the outside and have decent form, Memphis should at least have a couple guys up near 80% to give the ball to at the end of the game.

It can be argued that CDR and Rose choked at the line. It’s been too long since I took a stats class, but I’m sure somebody could figure out the odds that 2 guys who shoot ~70% would end up making 1 of 5 FT. I would also guess that the probability of that happening would be pretty low, which means that there probably was a choking factor involved particularly on CDR’s part, but in the end the game did come down to FTs. If Memphis managed to make 2 of those 5 FTs, the Chalmers 3 would have only affected the people betting in Vegas (barring a LJ 4 point play).