Yesterday we took on the Fighting Scots (creative nickname, I have no problem with their colors either) at the Leonard Athletic Complex on the campus of Macalester just a couple of miles south on Snelling Ave. My issue for the day was that we didn't play a doubleheader with the women's team. Our women played the Lady Scots at our place at 1pm while we played at 3pm at MAC. Just makes no sense at all. Why we can't all play doubleheaders I have no clue why. It's beyond stupid if you ask me.
MAC is coming off their first win of the year vs. St. John's and also their first win in conference in 52 games. They seemed to walk into the gym with a little more confidence than normal and that showed throughout the game. They certainly have a good nucleus of guys, which include the MIAC's leading scorer Pierce Peters, for them to get several wins in the league this year. Hopefully, none will be against us.
Per usual, the game was back and forth for the first 20 minutes. We really didn't want them to linger around and give them confidence to make a run at us in the 2nd half. We didn't do a great job of that. Part of that has to credit MAC, they play hard and execute their stuff. Those are two reasons why I believe they will get a couple of wins this season. They were giving themselves a bunch of second chances by dominating the boards in the first. They outrebounded us by ten in the first half including a 8-3 lead in the offensive boards category (more on this later). We still led for most of the first half and ended up leading 37-31 at the break. It part to the solid play of Charlie Choiniere as he went 3-3 from the floor in front of his old high school coach who is an assistant at MAC. Not a pretty half for us.
Our second half lead hovered between seven and ten points for the first couple of minutes of the half. MAC then increased their defensive pressure and really got into the passing lanes and forced some turnovers. Normally, if that happens it opens up bigger driving lanes to the hoop but we didn't take advantage of it and seemed tentative. The Scots got the lead down to three with about 13 minutes left to play. That didn't exactly bode well with the coaching staff. Nelson got into the guys a lot during a timeout and we responded with a little 5-0 run to get the lead back to eight.
MAC just wouldn't go away. They kept on battling and were like that annoying bug that keeps bothering you during the summer. MAC had a couple of mini runs and got the lead to two with five minutes to play as it looked like they had our number. We finally the got the ball inside and Carl Hipp took over down the stretch. They had no answer for him. We put the game away with some free throws in the final minutes as the final score was 81-71.
We were led by Mike's 19 including 9-11 from the charity stripe. Carl had 18 on an efficient 7-8 shooting in only 19 minutes. Per usual, Carl got into foul trouble and was forced to play five minutes in the first half. Embarrassing display by the MIAC refs with him. Once again we had a bunch of guys hovering in the six to eight point range. We did a good job defensively on their two leading scorers (Peters and Justin Wasik) holding them to 6-25 shooting. We still need to take away some of our mental errors on defense because teams always make us pay. That could be the difference in close games.
Two telling stats for this game. We got mauled on the boards (only by six but it seemed more than that) and gave up 17 offensive boards. Part of that is that MAC didn't shoot that well from the floor but they almost got 50% of their misses. Not good enough. We also had 20 turnovers. The previous two games we totally dominated both of these aspects of the game. If want to continue our winning ways we need to get back to dominating the glass and taking care of the ball. As it stands, we'll take the win. We are now 6-5 and 4-2 in the conference. We are currently tied with Gustavus for 3rd place with us holding the tiebreaker.
Next week will be play at St. Olaf on Wednesday night and then come back to Hutton for a Saturday matinee matchup with St. Mary's.
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