MISSOULA – If you were looking for a lesson on the theory of relativity, Dahlberg Arena – surprisingly – might have been the best place in Missoula to get one on Saturday.
When is a three-point lead not three points?
After Dischon Thomas made a 3-pointer with one minute, 34 seconds left, capping a breathless back-and-forth stretch in which neither team led by more than two points for over seven minutes of game time, the 62-59 lead it gave the Montana Grizzlies over Montana State certainly didn’t feel like just three points.
It felt like 10, maybe, or a million.
Not three, not with Montana State forced to call a timeout as Dahlberg exploded into a roaring tumult, the sweaty tension of the previous seven minutes evaporating and the rivalry win suddenly seeming that much closer to in the bag.
“You heard the place, it just erupted after (Thomas) hit that 3,” Montana guard Aanen Moody said. “It just felt like this was going to be different, this game was going to be different, and inside of my head, I could almost visualize what it felt like to win this.”
The problem, though, is that the scoreboard, boringly tethered to the real world, didn’t reflect the euphoria going around the stands. Three points, it said, perspective be damned. The other problem was that on the other side of the court were the defending Big Sky Conference champions. And it took Montana State just 17 seconds to tie the game again, this time on a falling away jumper in the lane by Darius Brown II that was good for an old-fashioned 3-point play.
After UM point guard Brandon Whitney answered with a floater in the lane, Montana State then took the lead for good in the final minute when RaeQuan Battle made three free throws after a controversial foul call, and the Bobcats survived Montana’s last two chances for a 67-64 win that had both head coaches taking diametrically opposed tacks in the post-game press conference.
“To win close games, you need to be as solid as possible, and not commit errors to beat yourself,” Montana head coach Travis DeCuire said. “You want to force your opponent to beat you, and I think just some costly turnovers they didn’t necessarily earn, balls dribbled out of bounds, maybe a couple times we committed to some drives that weren’t there, it ended up in their hands, and then a couple fouls down the stretch – it caught up with us.”
It was DeCuire’s first-ever home loss to Montana State, and continued a troubling trend. The Griz have led in the final 10 minutes of four of their five conference losses, and were tied with Eastern Washington with just over two minutes to go in the fifth.
“The deciding factor is the same thing that it’s been the last couple losses that we’ve taken like this,” Moody said. “Beating ourselves. We just find a way to not do what we’re supposed to do, and beating ourself and playing out of character.”
Montana State head coach Danny Sprinkle, though, was enjoying his maiden win in Missoula, the first in Dahlberg by a Bobcats team since 2010 – and the way his team did it.
“It’s meaningful because it’s one of the best rivalries in the country, and it’s meaningful because of what our players did,” Sprinkle said. “I think, the way the game unfolded, it was perfect. For (Montana) to come back, make a big 3, the place is going crazy, and our guys kept responding. … It’s always a physical game when you play Montana, but we’ve been talking a lot about mental toughness the last two, three weeks, and I thought today was probably the most mentally tough that our team has been this year.”
After jumping out to a 6-0 lead, holding that margin at halftime and leading by as many as nine early in the second half, the Bobcats got reeled back in, mostly at the free-throw line as the game turned physical and the refs started asserting the whistle.
Montana tied things up for the first time with 7:28 to go when Griz junior Josh Bannan made one of two free throws. Three times in the final 2:16, Montana nudged ahead – first on two Whitney free throws, then on Thomas’ 3 and Whitney’s floater.
Three times, the Bobcats hit back on the very next possession – Battle jumper, Brown and-1, Battle free throws.
Coming off their worst conference loss of the season – 74-70 to bottom-dweller Idaho on Monday – it was a steel-spined rebuke, not only to the fans in the building on Saturday, but to the memory of last year, when the atmosphere overwhelmed a 27-win ‘Cats team in a somewhat shocking 80-74 loss in Missoula that wasn’t that close.
“We came in with an edge today, I’m not going to lie,” MSU center Jubrile Belo, last year’s Big Sky MVP, said. “We were focused, we just said that they’re not going to punk us. We haven’t won here in a long time, and we just had to put our hard hats on.”
This year, Sprinkle has the defending conference MVP in Belo, the muscled, goggled and dreaded comic-book superhero who had 11 points, a team-high five rebounds (MSU only had 19 rebounds total compared to Montana’s 33) and one blot-out-the-sun block in the second half that sent Lonnell Martin Jr. flying into the stanchion.
Sprinkle has Battle, the loping apex predator, braids swinging around his head whenever he explodes into violent action, a former 4-star recruit who had 18 points Saturday, one spectacular alley-oop finish and two nearly alley-oop finishes that likely would have sent even the Griz fans into raptures.
He’s got Brown, new this year and not the intimidating equal of Belo or Battle – the transfer from CSU-Northridge is 6-2, skinny and balding – but blessed with a jitterbug stop-start handle and a deep shot-making bag.
Those three, plus plenty of other talent lurking, is where the conversation about Montana State repeating as conference champions starts.
But it’s the toughness they showed Saturday – bouncing back inside the madhouse, taking every punch and firing back regardless of whether the deficit felt like three or a million – that has Sprinkle counting down the days to Big Sky in Boise (46, he reminded the press conference audience, unprompted).
“A lot of resilience,” Brown said. “It was tough, especially in this environment, but that’s what our non-conference schedule was for. We played in a lot of tough environments – GCU, Arizona – to prepare us for a game like this. … We talk about this all the time, there’s going to be that time when we need one stop, one bucket. When they took that lead, they went up by three with about a minute-and-a-half (left), that was the moment we were like, OK, we worked on this. We’re ready for this.”
