Benny Gealer made a 3-pointer from the baseline with under a second remaining to lift Stanford to a 78-77 victory against Saint Louis in the championship of the Acrisure Invitational on Friday afternoon in Palm Desert, Calif.
After Ebuka Okorie made one free throw and deliberately missed his second free-throw attempt with three seconds left, AJ Rohosy grabbed the offensive rebound and fed Gealer for the high-arching 3-pointer that served as his only points of the game.
Chisom Okpara scored 19 points, Okorie scored 14 of his 17 points in the first half, Jeremy Dent-Smith scored all 12 of his points down the stretch on 3-point attempts and Rohosy added 11 points and nine rebounds for Stanford (6-1).
Trey Green scored 12 of his 15 points in the first half and Robbie Avila, Dion Brown and Ishan Sharma added 12 points each for the Billikens (6-1), who led for more than 30 minutes.
Quentin Jones scored on a second-chance layup to give Saint Louis a 73-71 lead with 53 seconds left. He followed with two free throws in a 1-and-1 situation with 26.5 seconds remaining to make it 75-71.
Ryan Agarwal flushed a 3 to cut it to 75-74 with 11 seconds left, but Jones nailed both ends of another 1-and-1 for a 77-74 lead with 9.7 seconds left.
Saint Louis then elected to play the percentages by fouling Okorie deliberately to keep Stanford from making a game-tying 3-point attempt. That wound up backfiring.
Saint Louis led by as many as 14 in the first half and 47-36 at break after holding the Cardinal to 38.5% shooting from the floor.
Stanford quickly began to chip away at the lead, cutting it to 53-48 on a 3-pointer from the wing by Okpara. It became a 3-point game on Okpara’s fast-break dunk with 9:48 remaining.
Dent-Smith sank 3-point tries on two straight possessions for the Cardinal to tie it 60-60 with 7:19 remaining.
Dent-Smith added a deep 3-pointer in transition to give Stanford its first lead since early in the game, 65-62, with 5:24 to go.
Gealer, who came in averaging 11.2 points for Stanford, picked up two fouls in the first three minutes of the game and he went back to the bench with his third foul with 9:45 left in the first half.
