'He's got cojones.' Butler freshman Finley Bizjack impresses Marquette's Shaka Smart.
INDIANAPOLIS – No. 4 Marquette has just survived a difficult night at Hinkle Fieldhouse, beating the surging Butler basketball team 78-72 to extend its own winning streak to eight games, but Marquette coach Shaka Smart is like the rest of inside this beautiful old arena: He’s blown away by Finley Bizjack.
Bizjack, a 6-4 Butler freshman who entered Tuesday night averaging 3.9 points per game, scored a career-high 19, including 16 in the second half to keep the Bulldogs within striking range, and afterward Smart needs to tell him something. It happens in the postgame handshake line, where Smart pays his respects to Butler coach Thad Matta and big-time Bulldogs like Pierre Brooks II and Jahmyl Telfort, but the handshake line grinds to a halt when Smart reaches Bizjack.
Smart’s talking and Bizjack is nodding, and now Bizjack is talking and Smart’s nodding as they’re carrying on a conversation five years in the making. Bizjack is a Texas kid, see, a rising star from the Dallas-Fort Worth era at the end of Smart’s tenure with the Texas Longhorns from 2015-21, and he'd tried to talk with Smart before the game.
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“But he had in his AirPods,” Bizjack’s telling me on the court at Hinkle, where Marquette fans are waiting for their players to come out and say hello. “This was about an hour before the game. I grew up wanting to play for Texas, and Coach Smart’s a great coach. I played against one of his guys at Texas, Greg Brown (III), and I just wanted to tell him that.”
As we’re talking, Smart walks past. He’s coming out of the Marquette locker room, heading for his postgame radio show, when he sees Bizjack. They smile and nod at each other — long time, no see — and now I’m chasing down Smart to ask him about Bizjack.
“Hell of a player,” Shaka says. “He’s got great poise for a freshman, and he’s got…”
Smart pauses here. Should he finish that sentence? He decides to go for it.
“He’s got cojones,” Smart says.
Butler close to 2024 NCAA tournament bid
A quick word on this Butler basketball team:
The Bulldogs (16-9, 7-7) are trending toward a spot in the 2024 NCAA tournament, which would be their first since 2018. A win Tuesday night would’ve all but wrapped up a bid, giving them a season sweep of the No. 4 team in the country to go with a win at No. 16 Creighton and another against Texas Tech, currently sitting No. 26 in the NCAA NET rankings after a 29-point blowout of Kansas.
The Bulldogs can hang with the best teams in the country — they pushed No. 1 UConn for most of 40 minutes in a 71-62 loss at Storrs, Conn., last week — but they have to take care of business the rest of the way. It would help to beat Creighton on Saturday, or win at Villanova (No. 41 NET) next week, or both. It would be crushing to lose any of the other four games left on the schedule: at Seton Hall and DePaul, home against St. John’s and Xavier.
Matta has been around the block a few times, and he wasn’t hearing a question after this game about March Madness.
“I know this,” he said. "March doesn’t matter if we don’t take care of February.”
He also knows this: In Finley Bizjack, he has a rapidly improving freshman starting to play like the big-time recruit he was coming out of Trophy Club, Texas.
Bizjack was a top-100 player in the class of 2023 after scoring 2,832 career points in Texas' largest classification, but he started this season slowly. He started it like a freshman in the Big East, in other words, missing 11 of his first 12 shots from 3-point range. He scored 17 points in December against Saginaw Valley, going 3-for-6 from distance, then was 2-for-20 in the next 10 games.
But he’s heating up again. In the 21st game of his college career, he scored 11 in the win at Creighton. In the past four games, starting in Omaha, Neb., he's averaging 9.5 ppg on 8-for-15 shooting behind the arc.
On Tuesday, when most of his teammates were going cold in the second half and Butler found itself trailing 57-45 with nine minutes left, Bizjack buried a 3-pointer on a nice drive-and-find from Telfort (12 points, six rebounds, six assists).
And so it began: The Finley Bizjack Show.
How good was he? He upstaged the Red Panda.
Hinkle was treated to Red Panda, then Finley Bizjack
You know the Red Panda, right? NBA halftime act deluxe, though she’s not in town for the NBA All-Star Game later this week. She was here Tuesday night because Butler asked, and she was out there just doing silly stuff, riding her 7-foot unicycle around the same court where Butler’s mascot deluxe, Blue IV, was driving a tiny convertible.
Sure, read that again.
Blue IV was driving like a champ, wind ruffling through his English Bulldog hair, after Red Panda had ridden her unicycle from baseline to baseline, catching ceramic bowls from a colleague. It started with an impossible trick, Red Panda balancing one bowl on her foot while the other rocked the unicycle back and forth until she was ready to kick the bowl into the air and onto her head.
Turns out, she was just getting started. Next she balanced two bowls on her foot and kicked them both, in the same motion — one after another, clink-clink — onto her head. Then three, then four, and now she’s balancing five bowls on one foot while the other rocks the unicycle in place, and the entire arena is riveted, and now we’re roaring YES I SAID WE because she’s just sent five bowls toward her head with a single kick … and caught them all.
Clink-clink-clink-clink-clink.
Then the second half starts and it’s not going well for the home team until Bizjack buries that 3-pointer to make it 57-48.
Turns out, he was just getting started.
Bizjack is being defended by Marquette All-American Tyler Kolek, and just punishing the poor guy. He’s exploding past Kolek to the rim four times in three minutes, going 6-for-7 from the line with a three-point play thrown in for good measure.
By now everyone in the building is looking for Bizjack, including his teammates, and Brooks (15 points, six rebounds) finds him for a 3-pointer. The entire arena is riveted and now we’re roaring YES I SAID WE because the shot has just gone in to cut Marquette’s lead to 64-62 with four minutes left.
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Bizjack is bellowing his way down the court, bobbing his head as his terrific hair — looks like the same ‘do as one of the NBA’s Lopez twins, whichever one has the cool hair — after scoring 13 points in five minutes.
Alas, Marquette pulls away even as Bizjack has one more big shot in his bag, a baseline drive where he’s confronted at the rim by bouncy 6-11 Marquette forward Oso Ighodaro. Bizjack floats past Ighodaro, under the rim, and spins a reverse layup off the glass as Ighodaro smacks him to the deck.
It’s a shocking bucket to end a stunner of a second half, where Bizjack scored 16 points in the final nine minutes. Afterward, in the news conference room, he’s not interested in reliving the good. He’d rather take the blame for the bad, Kolek’s own second-half explosion: 17 of his game-high 27 points, and three of his five assists.
“I’ve been prepared for it all week in practice,” Bizjack said of defending Kolek, “so I’ve got no excuse for not stopping him. He likes to go left and throw that pocket pass, and I knew that, so there’s no excuse for me not being able to stop that.”
That’s how he talks, this freshman from Texas who is becoming more comfortable by the game. And in his 25th college game Tuesday night he was going shot-for-shot with the preseason Big East player of the year, trick-for-trick with the Red Panda herself, and then heart-to-heart with the opposing coach he admires so much. Turns out, the feeling’s mutual.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Butler's Finley Bizjack outdoes Red Panda, but Dawgs fall to Marquette
