Big Sky Conference

Hall, Bobcats experiencing success together

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For his first season and a half at Montana State, Tyler Hall’s prodigious scoring ability did not matter much to the Bobcat star nor his team’s final results on the court.

During his Big Sky Conference Freshman of the Year debut season, Hall announced his presence resoundingly by scoring 36 points at Southern Utah in his first league game. The effort came in a 93-82 loss, one of just three Big Sky wins by SUU last season.

Hall went on to average 20.2 points per game during conference play and 18.6 points per game overall, shattering Montana State’s single-season scoring record for a freshman. The smooth 6-foot-5 shooting guard from Rock Island, Illinois led MSU in scoring on 16 occasions his freshman year, but the Bobcats won just six of those contests during a 14-17 campaign the ended in a first-round loss in the Big Sky Tournament to Sacramento State.

The trend continued during Montana State’s tough opening stretch of the current season. The Bobcats jumped out to a 5-2 start only to lose 10 of 11, the skid including a loss in which Hall scored 42 points at home and the low point an 82-64 loss at Eastern Washington despite Hall’s 33 points.

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

Two nights later, Hall poured in 32 points in an overtime loss at Idaho, the seventh 30-point game of his already-decorated career. The outing served as the 13th time Hall had led the Bobcats in scoring this season; MSU was 4-9 in those games, including 0-7 in Hall’s career in games in which he had scored at least 30.

Each time Hall would go on personal runs to pull his team close — he scored 17 straight to give his team a one-point lead in Cheney before the Bobcats fell apart — Montana State would let his memorable performances go to waste. And after each loss, Hall would deflect questions about his own personal accomplishments, choosing instead to talk only about his team and their hunger to cure their ills. The struggles continued after returning from the Palouse as a 95-90 home loss to North Dakota despite Hall’s 23 dropped MSU to 1-4 in league play.

The scoring performance pushed Hall passed 1,000 points in his career, believed to be the fastest any Big Sky player has reached the landmark number. But MSU sat at 7-12 overall.

“Even the worst team in America has a best player but that doesn’t mean he’s a good player,” MSU head coach Brian Fish said last November before beginning his third season. “For Tyler to get the awards and adulation he can get, we have to win basketball games.”

For Hall and the Bobcats, the sting of the losses could not be wiped away by the individual records. Over the last three weeks, however, the Bobcats have bucked the trend.

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

Two nights after surpassing 1,000 points, Hall battled through the flu to score 13 points in Montana State’s 68-50 win over Northern Colorado. The Bobcats have not lost since. And MSU has found a winning formula with Hall’s ability to delegate some of the scoring load to true freshman point guard Harald Frey.

Frey, a southpaw from Oslo, Norway, has been a revelation during Big Sky play, particularly during the successful surge. Frey scored 19 in the UNC win and a career-high 22 five nights later in a 74-65 win at Sacramento State. The win in the Nest snapped MSU’s 11-game losing streak away from Bozeman. In a 71-65 win over Portland State, Hall scored 22 and has led MSU in scoring and to victory three straight times since.

“It was tough when we weren’t closing things out,” Hall said on Tuesday. “It sucks losing no matter if we have a good game or not. Just seeing us come out on top in these close games and put stuff together is helping all of us confidence-wise. Practice has been better, the crowds have been better and everything seems to be on the rise so we need to keep it going.”

“The main thing is Tyler is trusting Harry a little more,” Fish said of the recent turnaround. “Guys on the team are trusting Harry more. Harry is becoming a better vocal leader. It’s somewhat like what happened when (former All-Big Sky point guard) Marcus (Colbert) started trusting Tyler a little more last year. Hopefully that continues because the more aggressive Harry is, the better Tyler is and the better we are.”

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

Although the internal struggles weighed on Hall and his teammates, externally the smooth scoring guard has remained one of the most feared mid-major players in college basketball. He enters Saturday’s showdown with rival Montana — he scored 30 in his Dahlberg Arena debut last spring — averaging 23.2 points per game, the fourth-best mark in Division I.

Hall scored 31 points in a 94-92 double-overtime win against Idaho in Bozeman, giving MSU its first victory in a 30-point outing by Hall. He led MSU with 19 points, including a crucial layup late in overtime to lift the Bobcats to a 91-90 win over Eastern Washington. Hall earned Big Sky Player of the Week honors as MSU won for the fifth straight time, pushing its league record to 6-4 and its overall mark to 11-12.

Tyler Hall is just amazing,” said Northern Arizona head coach Jack Murphy, who’s Lumberjacks host MSU in Flagstaff five nights after the Cat-Griz showdown in Missoula. “I picked Montana State to win the league before the year and I think they have proven in the non-conference how good they can be. Tyler Hall is just fantastic. He’s as efficient a player as there is in the country. And talent-wise, he’s as good a player as there is in the country regardless of conference or league. He’s gotta be the next guy out of the Big Sky to go to the NBA.”

Over the last decade, the Big Sky has become a proving ground for highly productive guards to pile up points and gain NBA attention despite the conference’s mid-major designation. Former Montana guard Michael Ray Richardson is perhaps the first and most famous after becoming the No. 4 overall pick by the New York Knicks in the 1978 NBA Draft.

Since then, 17 Big Sky players have been drafted into the NBA, including a strong lineage of big men highlighted by former Montana power forward Larry Krystkowiak in 1985 and last season’s Big Sky MVP Joel Bolomboy of Weber State.

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

MSU guard Tyler Hall (3)

As the game has evolved, it’s been high scoring guards who have had the best chance at carrying on professionally from the Big Sky. Rodney Stuckey sparked the current trend, averaging 24.6 points per game as a sophomore at Eastern Washington before becoming the 15th overall selection by the Detroit Pistons in the 2007 NBA Draft.

Stuckey notched nine 30-point games in his two years at EWU; Hall already has eight. Stuckey made 98 3-pointers; Hall already has 190. Stuckey scored 1,438 points at Eastern; Hall needs one point for 1,100 with at least nine games left in his sophomore season.

While Stuckey is one parallel to draw, the 6-foot-5, 205-pounder is much more of a slashing bruiser than Hall. The more accurate comparison is Damian Lillard, the two-time Big Sky Player of the Year at Weber State who went on to become the No. 6 overall pick in the NBA Draft by the Portland Trailblazers and the 2013 NBA Rookie of the Year.

To say Hall is a lottery pick right now is incorrect. He does not have the ball-handling prowess or the ability to play point guard like Lillard does But to track his trajectory compared to Lillard, himself a smooth-shooting 6-foot-3 combo guard with, like Hall, elite footwork is plausible. Lillard was the league’s Freshman of the Year in 2009 by averaging 11.5 points per game on 43.4 percent shooting. He shot 37 percent from downtown. Last season, Hall averaged 18.6 points per game while shooting 45.2 percent from the floor and 43 percent from beyond the arc.

Lillard’s sophomore year, he was the Big Sky MVP by averaging 19.9 pints and 3.6 assists. That season, he shot 43.1 percent from the floor and 39.3 percent from beyond the arc. Hall is at 23.3 points per game on a stellar 47 percent shooting, including 41.8 percent from beyond the arc.

MSU guard Tyler Hall on the bench with coach Brian Fish

MSU guard Tyler Hall on the bench with coach Brian Fish

“Sometimes, I think we take for granted some of the shots he makes and how difficult they are,” Fish said earlier this season. “He’ll have one, two, three people on him and he makes them and continues to score at a very high pace when they know he’s shooting and we know he’s shooting. He still continues to make them. He’s a fantastic player.”

While Lillard played for a perennial power alongside All-Big Sky talents like Scott Bamforth and Kyle Tresnak and Hall is the key cog in Fish’s rebuilding project at Montana State, Hall certainly knew about Lillard’s rise before choosing MSU over Northern Iowa, Northern Illinois and South Dakota.

“I don’t think about going to the NBA – that’s the dream of course – but I just think that whole story of going somewhere not the biggest, but putting yourself on the map by putting someone else on the map, you realize if you can play, people will find you,” Hall said a few days before the opening of conference play. “Hard work pays off. I look at people like Damian Lillard, people like that are a big inspiration to me and I hope I can reach that level someday.”

Hall has received draft hype already this year — two different national scouting websites project him as a second-round pick if he came out after this season — but that seems in the distant future. Right now, he is concentrated on helping his Bobcats snap their 14-game losing streak to the arch rival from the West.

MSU guardTyler Hall (3)

MSU guardTyler Hall (3)

“I honestly didn’t think I would be at this point, but I have a lot of confidence not just in myself but I know my teammates have a lot of confidence in me and my coaches have a lot of confidence in me,” said Hall, who averaged 17 points per game his senior year of high school. “I like the city of Bozeman, I love our coaches and it makes me really comfortable.

“We are starting to really come together. We are playing hard and being tough for 40 minutes and we are finally closing out games. We weren’t at the beginning of the season but that comes along with us being a young team. We are starting to figure it out. Now we have to figure out how to win this one on Saturday.”

Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved. 

 

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About Colter Nuanez

Colter Nuanez is the co-founder and senior writer for Skyline Sports. After spending six years in the newspaper industry with stops at the Missoulian, the Ellensburg Daily Record and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the former Washington Newspaper Association Sportswriter of the Year and University of Montana Journalism School graduate ('09) has cultivated a deep passion for sports journalism during his 13-year career covering the Big Sky Conference. In August of 2014, Colter and brother Brooks merged their passions of writing and art to found Skyline Sports.

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