Knights looking to save face in losing season

The Knights needed to win all three of their final regular season games to sneak their way into a winning overall record this season. So far they’ve lost two of them, plummeting their record to 12-16 overall and 5-12 in the American Athletic Conference.

Pulling off a winning season was already set to be a challenge when the Knights rolled into Cincinnati Feb. 25. The Bearcats (20-9, 11-5) had earned votes in the AP Top 25 poll in December and consistently battled for the top slot in the conference. They had also spanked the Knights 56-46 on UCF’s home court a month ago.

This time would prove no different, aside from the magnitude of the result. The closest the Knights would get to a win over the Bearcats came with six minutes left in the first period when they reeled Cincinnati to within three points. After that the scoring gap broadened dramatically, to as wide as 25 points shortly before the game ended, with Cincinnati ending up on top 83-60.

The Knights would hit only half as many of their shots as the Bearcats, though it took a more evenly shot second half for Cincinnati to bury the Knights, who had no breakaway heroes to lift their average. That UCF’s most accurate shooter on the night — Shaheed Davis — hammered two of three shots while playing the fewest minutes of any Knight didn’t help. Meanwhile scoring leader Brandon Goodwin managed to sink just over 42 percent of his shots en route to 12 points.

It got worse for the Knights when they spent their final home game of the season losing to one of the worst teams in the American Athletic Conference.

East Carolina had won as few games as the Knights, both in the conference and overall, when they stepped onto the CFE Arena floor, sharing the AAC’s bottom third with the Knights and nearly winless USF and Houston.

The Pirates (13-16, 6-10) emerged from UCF’s court having lifted themselves above the Knights, leapfrogged Tulane and catapulted their way to mid-pack respectability in the conference, all in one 71-66 win.

It would take a shipwreck of a finale to hand the victory to the Pirates. The Knights had dominated the game from the start, controlling the entire first half and nearing a double-digit lead in the second. Freshman Adonys Henriquez would notch 14 points, all but two coming from the big arc. Brandon Goodwin would chip in eight assists, snag six turnovers, and grab four rebounds as the Knights manhandled the Pirates.

But a disastrous final two minutes would fell the Knights’ in front of an announced crowd of 3,740 fans who had watched their team lead nearly the entire game up to that point.

In those final two minutes the Knights would miss five of their last seven shots, including half from the free throw line. They would turn the ball over when they were a shot away from retaking taking the lead, and then they would watch as nearly every foul led to two buried free throws by the Pirates — accounting for the game’s scoring gap of five points, all of them earned in the final eight seconds of the game.

For seniors Kasey Wilson and Myles Davis, a final win on their home court wouldn’t come.

“Those guys have been huge for our program,” UCF head coach Donnie Jones told UCFKnights.com after the game. “It was a disappointing loss.”

The result left the Knights with a 12-16 overall record, and 5-12 in the conference, where they fell another rung on the ladder. Cushioned by the statistical anomaly of two conference teams with three total conference wins between them, the Knights mathematically can’t finish in the bottom of the conference.

Heading into their final game at USF (8-21, 2-13) in Tampa, which played at press time Wednesday, the Knights could not possibly drop below their longtime in-state rivals, even with a loss. And thanks to their Feb. 19 win over Tulane — the only conference rival with a positive overall record whom they’ve beaten — the Knights ran no mathematical risk of finishing worse in the AAC than their 2013-14 season, when they finished 4-14 in the conference.

Even with a win, part of their fate was already set in stone. They’ve already accomplished something no UCF men’s basketball team has done since 2001, and which no collegiate team under head coach Donnie Jones has ever done — post back-to-back losing seasons. And they’ll enter the record books with the fifth worst conference record since they first became affiliated in 1975.

But with a win, they could finally exorcise a ghost that’s haunted them since after the 2004-05 season: the Knights haven’t won their final regular season game for 10 years.