Basketball dealt rare home loss
The third-longest home winning streak in the nation ended Wednesday night.
Sophomore forward Chris Udofia scored 15 points, hitting 5 of 8 field goals, to lead the Denver Pioneers past the Utah State men’s basketball team 67-54 at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum.
Senior forward Rob Lewis scored the first bucket of the game, an easy layup off the tough-to-guard Princeton system Denver uses, and the Pioneers dominated USU the remainder of the game.
“Well, Denver put on a clinic tonight, I thought that they were really good,” USU head coach Stew Morrill said. “You could see their experience, you could see their system working and they took advantage of our miscues and our inexperience. They just dominated us, we got outplayed, we got out-coached; we just got out-everything-ed tonight.”
USU worked on scouting Denver’s system for three days in practice. However, the Aggies struggled immensely to not only replicate the system, but to understand, defend and play against the system.
“It’s hard to simulate in practice with a scout team that can’t run the system nearly as hard and nearly as well as they do,” Morrill said. “We tried to do drills for it and we still got carved up.”
USU tied the game and took a one-point lead in the early minutes of the game, but Denver used a 20-4 run over a 10-minute span to put USU in a deep hole.
Denver led 31-14 before USU showed some life and responded with a run of its own. Freshman Jordan Stone checked in and made an immediate impact with his size. Stone hit a pair of free throws and got a put-back layup, which sparked a 15-3 Aggie run to end the half.
Sophomore guard Preston Medlin scored 13 points, while senior forward Morgan Grim finished with 11 points and eight rebounds.
The Pioneers shot 52 percent from the field and 40 percent from the 3-point line. Denver finished with 16 assists, while the Aggies only finished with six dimes.
“They did a really good job of moving the ball and sharing the ball,” senior guard Brockeith Pane, who finished with 12 points, said. “They shot the heck out of the ball. They did a very good job of going to the 3-point line and we didn’t do a very good job of keeping our man in front of us.”
Denver played a solid four-and-a-half minutes to begin the second half, building a double-digit lead again courtesy of a 12-4 run. USU did not cut the lead below double digits the remainder of the game.
“We knew they were a good team,” Medlin said. “I just think we made simple mistakes that gave them some threes and back-door layups that we weren’t supposed to give up.”
The Pioneers hit eight 3-point attempts and scored 28 of their 67 points inside the paint.
Denver’s deliberate style limited USU’s possessions and the Aggies were not able to make each possession count.
“Give them all the credit that they deserve,” Morrill said. “They have a bunch of seniors that are tough and physical who can shoot it. They have a very good system and those guys have been in the system for a long time, and they did a great job in it. They deserve all the credit tonight.”
After a two-game road trip, USU was expecting a packed, loud Spectrum, but that was not the case. USU students were silent for the first three minutes of the game and the Spectrum was filled to half capacity at most.
“Just seeing the Spectrum, how it was against BYU and then you come back from a two-game road trip and not having our fans here kind of hurt us. I know it hurt me.
“We didn’t have our sixth man with us,” Morrill said. “It’s kind of hard when you don’t have your sixth man with you, but five guys on the court and 11 guys on the bench and four or five coaches who all want to win. We’ve just got to get better. This has got to be a learning experience.”
Morrill said the Aggies will get better despite the tough loss.
“It is tough, we have been good in this building. It’s tough to have a showing like that,” he said “All you can really do is go back to the drawing board tomorrow and try to get better, and that is what we will do.
“It’s not time to panic, it’s time to get better,” he added.
– ty.d.hus@aggiemail.usu.edu