Game Recap

Griz lose in near identical fashion for second straight time at Southern Utah

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The final minute Saturday afternoon was nearly a carbon copy of the final minute on Thursday night in Cedar City.

Thursday, John Knight III hit a free throw with 2.6 seconds left to lift Southern Utah to a 64-63 win over Montana, its first win over the Griz in Cedar City since 1999. Saturday, a Nick Fleming free throw with 1.3 seconds left helped SUU to a 75-74 win to help the Thunderbirds to a second straight Big Sky Conference victory over the Grizzlies.

In the new scheduling format for the Big Sky, Montana got a chance for payback following the letdown Thursday night. In a game that tipped just 39 hours after the Griz fell to 0-1 in league play for the first time in more than a decade, the final minute looked almost identical to the nail biter less than two days earlier.

Montana led for the duration of the second half only to see last-minute offensive rebounds doom the Griz for the second time this weekend. Thursday, the Griz gave up two offensive rebounds in the final 89 seconds of the game, including one that led to a four-point possession to allow SUU to take its first and only lead of the second half.

Saturday, a Dre Marin jumper with 40 seconds left gave the T-Birds its first lead of the second half and its first advantage in more than 21 minutes overall. With 20 seconds left, Marin, a senior playing in his school-record 100th game for the Thunderbirds, hit two more free throws to extend the advantage to 74-71.

Just like Thursday, Josh Vazquez came off a screen to hit a game-tying 3-pointer. And just like Thursday, a questionable whistle in the waning seconds of the action gave Southern Utah a chance to shoot the game winners at the charity stripe.

After Vazquez hit his second 3-pointer of the game and his sixth of the road trip with 11 seconds left, SUU junior Tevian Jones wound the clock down before shooting a forced 3-pointer from the top of the arc with less than three seconds left.

Fleming corralled the offensive rebound — SUU had 10 offensive boards Thursday, 23 for the weekend, leading to 15 second-chance points in each game — and tried to essentially volleyball set the ball back at the basket.

Vazquez was called for a foul, Fleming hit the first of two free throws, the buzzer sounded at America First Events Center and the Griz found themselves at 0-2 in Big Sky play for the first time in 13 years.

“It’s been the same thing for us we’ve been working on for awhile, which is finishing possessions,” Montana seventh-year head coach Travis DeCuire told Riley Corcoran on the Grizzly Radio Network. “We said this the other day: you can’t defend for 25 seconds and not get the job done. We have to rebound.

“What I wrote down for these guys to discuss is rebounds, loose balls. It seemed when execution broke down, there were a couple of guys who were confused.”

In the first battle between the Big Sky contenders, Knight III pounded the paint relentlessly by penetrating in the half-court and running in transition. The athletic former Utah State transfer finished with 21 points and nine rebounds despite taking a hard spill late in the second half.

In the day and a half leading up to Saturday’s game, Corcoran reported seeing Knight in a sling, but the senior still received the start. The combo guard was clearly hindered by the pain and his right shoulder was heavily taped, limiting him to just five shot attempts and four points in 33 minutes of action.

Marin, Jones and junior wing Maizen Fausett stepped up to make up for Knight’s dip in production. Marin, a four-year starter who has been one of the most steady players of fifth-year head coach Todd Simon’s tenure at SUU, knocked down four 3-pointers and shot 6-of-12 overall on Saturday on the way to 19 points. He also grabbed eight rebounds as SUU owned a 34-28 advantage on the glass.

Southern Utah point guard Dre Marin, pictured here against Idaho in last season’s Big Sky Tournament in Boise, Idaho/ by Brooks Nuanez

“He’s tough as nails,” Simon said in his post-game interview on Pluto TV. “We challenge our guards to get their nose in there and get some rebounds for us. John Knight getting us six with one arm…Dre played his game too. Those guys did a heck of a job helping us out.

“Montana is a very good ball club. They have size and length and strength, they are well-coached. So that was big for us.”

Fausett scored 14 points on Thursday nigh and followed it up with 16 points on 5-of-11 shooting Saturday. The 6-foot-6 wing hit a pair of triples — Southern Utah went 10-of-33 from beyond the arc — and also snared a game-high nine rebounds.

DeCuire went with his third different starting lineup in as many games, giving Vazquez and fellow sophomore Kyle Owens the nod alongside senior post Michael Steadman, freshman power forward Josh Bannan and freshman point guard Brandon Whitney.

Derrick Carter-Hollinger, last season’s Freshman of the Year, was in street clothes on Saturday. Cameron Satterwhite, a graduate transfer who played last year at Northern Arizona and started his career at Loyola-Chicago, was also in street close. Robby Beasley, a highly regarded former 3-star recruit from Southern California, is still waiting to make his Griz debut.

Without those three, DeCuire essentially employed a six-man rotation that included the starters along with Cam Parker, a former Sacred Heart transfer who knocked down all three of his 3-point tries during a 15-point first half that helped Montana to a 36-31 lead at the break. Parker finished with 19 points, second only to Owens, who scored a career-high 21 points.

Parker’s hot shooting late in the first half helped the Griz carry momentum into the second half as the Griz used a 23-2 run to turn what grew to a nine-point SUU led less than nine minutes into the game into a 13-point Griz lead less than three minutes into the second half.

“When we do the right things on both sides of the ball and we play with the right intent, we can be a pretty good basketball team,” DeCuire said. “On the flip side, we have to learn how to sustain it.

“I asked these guys the other day: does success breed success? I tried to explain to them that it doesn’t. I thought we got complacent. Every time we got down double figures, our shot selection went down hill and our scrap disappeared. We got up 13, they gave us the game and we just had some guys who got a little unfocused.”

Montana sophomore Kyle Owens scored a career-high 21 points Saturday against Southern Utah/ by Southern Utah athletics

Owens, a 6-foot-8 southpaw from the Los Angeles area, spent the off-season remaking his shot and it’s showed early on. He scored 11 points in a 76-62 loss at USC, 10 points Thursday and a career-high on Saturday. He finished Montana’s most recent loss 9-of-14 from the floor and his second made 3-pointer with 6:27 left gave UM its last big lead, 67-58.

“Hard work is paying off,” DeCuire said. “I don’t know if there’s anyone in our program who put in more time into his game in the off-season.”

Steadman, a former San Jose State transfer who sat out last season, continued showing his ability to score in the paint. He finished with 13 points on 6-of-13 shooting to go with a team-high seven rebounds, but he only earned one trip to the free throw line in his first game as a Griz where he himself did not battle foul trouble.

Montana is 0-2 in league play for just the second time in 23 years while Southern Utah has an early spot in the driver’s seat in the Big Sky race. Each team along with the rest of the league will not return to conference action until after the New Year.

In the mean time, Southern Utah has a pair of in-state opponents as the T-Birds play at Utah Valley on Wednesday before hosting Dixie State on December 17. The Griz play at Georgia of the SEC on Tuesday.

“This weekend felt like January and now we have to go back into non-conference mode,” DeCuire said. “We have to get better before we get back to conference. We will see what happens.”

Photos courtesy of Southern Utah Athletics and Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.

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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