Man on a mission: Carroll nets 44
Jaycee Carroll poured in a career-high 44 points and led USU to a victory over New Mexico State Monday night, topping his previous career-high of 32, also set against the other Aggies last year in Las Cruces.
“I guess Carroll is not in a shooting slump any longer,” USU Head Coach Stew Morrill said, showing off his dry wit. “That was a great effort by him and a great effort by our team.”
Carroll was boiling over with energy from the moment he hit the floor. He scored USU’s first eight points by grabbing rebounds, pushing the ball headlong up the floor for layups, and drawing fouls. He finished the first half with 18 points.
“I got a couple of long rebounds right away and I looked up and New Mexico State wasn’t getting back so I was able to get going,” Carroll, who finished with a game-high ten boards, said. “When the post guys keep their guys boxed out it makes it easy to get rebounds.”
Although they never trailed, the Aggies were in a dogfight in the first half as New Mexico State tied the score up four times.
Elijah Ingram was 3-for-3 shooting from long distance and seven-foot center Hatila Passos had seven rebounds to keep NMSU within two points at the break.
USU came out with another Carroll-fueled run to start the second half, extending their lead to 11 briefly before New Mexico State Head Coach Reggie Theus called timeout and rallied his troops.
The second half would follow this pattern of alternating runs but the visitors could never pull closer than six, not with Carroll shooting the lights out.
“I’ve been kind of a second-half player so I figured with 18 in the first half who knows what will happen in the second,” Carroll, who scored 26 in the second, said. “If only I could have gotten it up a little higher.”
Morrill said he wasn’t worried about wearing Carroll out, despite playing him for a team-high 34 minutes.
“He doesn’t lack for energy ever, not in shootaround, not in practice. It doesn’t matter if you travel to Hawaii or travel to Alaska. You come back off a mission and run a four-forty mile, you’ve got something special,” the USU coach said.
Justin Hawkins, who transferred to NMSU from Utah, was able to ignore chants of “Utah reject” from the Aggie student section and lead his team with 18 points on 8-10 shooting. New Mexico protected the basket well, finishing with five blocks, three from Martin Iti.
“New Mexico State, you look at them on tape and you say ‘oh my goodness’ with their size,” Morrill said. “It was huge for us to outrebound that team by 12.”
Theus also singled out USU’s rebounding edge as a deciding factor in their favor.
“I can accept the way [Carroll] played but not the rebounding effort,” Theus said. “They outrebounded us in the second half. Two of my best rebounders got one and two rebounds.”
Chaz Spicer, USU’s second-leading scorer with 13, threw down a dunk with 5:07 to go, giving the Aggies a 13-point edge, but Theus’ troops showed their trademark tenacity and kept applying full-court pressure, which was sporadically effective and forced 16 USU turnovers.
Ultimately Carroll’s hot shooting (12-16 from the field, 15-15 from the line) was too much for the visitors to overcome.
“Obviously we were saying let’s let him get 44 and 10 and see if we can beat the other four guys,” Theus said. “In my day I would have shown him the lights. I mean that affectionately.”
The Aggie Student Section’s attempts to rattle the former NBA great were an intriguing subplot to the game. Theus took the fans’ ribbing good-naturedly, saying the Spectrum is his favorite place to come play aside from NMSU’s home court. He even posed for pictures with contestants in a ‘Reggie Theus lookalike’ contest after the game.
“They like giving me a lot of crap,” Theus said. “The students here are tremendous. They’re very organized. I should have sat down and enjoyed the game instead of stomping my feet and getting a technical and acting silly.”
-graham@cc.usu.edu