Triple-digit scoring
When a college basketball team scores 105 points, there is a good chance it will win.
That was the case for the USU men’s basketball team Sunday afternoon. Sophomore guard Preston Medlin scored 26 points and pulled down nine rebounds to lead the Aggies over the Oakland Golden Grizzlies 105-81 at the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum in the semifinal of the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament.
“Everything looks easy when you make a lot of shots, and we made a lot of shots tonight,” USU head coach Stew Morrill said. “When you look at points and assists and only 11 turnovers, that’s a huge number for us. We just played really good offense. They’ve got some explosive scorers, they just had a hard time stopping us and that was basically the game.”
USU has won seven of its last eight games and punched its ticket to the CIT Championship game against Mercer on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Spectrum.
“Hopefully we’ll have some energy left,” Morrill said. “They know it’s the last game, no matter what.”
Senior guard Brockeith Pane, who finished with 20 points and 10 assists, scored USU’s first points of the game on a 15-foot jumper. Oakland sophomore guard Travis Bader hit a 3-pointer on the ensuing possession to give the Grizzlies their only lead of the entire game.
“The snowball is rolling right now,” senior forward Morgan Grim said. “It’s showing in practice and it’s carrying into games.”
Grim, who finished with 18 points and 10 assists, gave USU a 4-3 lead with a layup after Bader’s 3-pointer, and USU exploded with four straight 3-pointers as part of a 12-3 run.
USU maintained its double-digit lead and pushed the advantage to greater than 20 points on a 3-pointer from junior guard E.J. Farris.
USU shot 81.8 percent from 3-point range and 70 percent from the field in the first half, which gave the Aggies a 60-43 lead at halftime.
“We had a lot of shots going in during the first half,” Grim said. “I thought it was pretty ridiculous – 70 percent is ridiculous. We were making a lot of shots and getting the crowd into. We got an early jump on them.”
USU’s 60 points was the most it has scored in the first half in team history and its 105 points are the most scored since scoring 111 points against Southern Oregon on Nov. 22, 1997.
“They were really, really good tonight.” Oakland head coach Greg Kampe said. “I understand this hasn’t been Morrill’s best year or his best team, but they were prepared tonight. I can’t believe that they’ve played any better than that this year. We ran into their ‘A’ game tonight.”
USU had trouble getting stops on Oakland in the first half as the Grizzlies shot 48 percent from the field and 47 percent from 3-point range. Oakland slowed down in the second half however, as they hit 27 percent from the field and 3-point range.
“We were shooting it in, that’s for sure, but we know they were a high-scoring team as well,” Berger said. “Luckily, we were able to match it. In the first half, they were shooting lights-out, but so were we. We were able to string a few stops together in the second half and lower their percentage down a little bit.”
USU’s largest lead of the night came with 3:20 to play, 105-75, on a pair of free throws from sophomore guard Danny Berger, who finished with 17 points on 5 of 6 shooting from 3-point range and 5 of 8 shooting overall.
“I just took the open looks and knocked them down,” Berger said.
– ty.d.hus@aggiemail.usu.edu