OMAHA, Neb. – In Montana State’s season-opening, 89-80 overtime win against Omaha in Great Falls, Brian Fish’s team played the Mavericks even in the paint.
Thursday night at Baxter Arena, UNO delivered a knockout punch inside.
The Mavericks outscored MSU by 16 down low, powering an 84-71 win in front of 2,033 that dropped the Bobcats to a 7-6 mark to close their non-conference slate.
“Just poor defense,” MSU junior center Sam Neumann said. “We were fouling too much down low, poor defense and we just didn’t execute the scouting report.”
Darrin Hansen’s team rolled up 46 paint points and shot 58 percent from the floor overall. They made just five 3-pointers, but got looks at the rim in every way imaginable.
Montana State junior Sam Neumann
They got out in transition. They drove to the hoop. They backed down the smaller Bobcats. They turned a modest six offensive rebounds into 10 second-chance points.
“We were allowing our missed shots to affect us defensively and you can’t do that,” Fish said. “You have to be able to play through when shots aren’t going. The first four or five minutes we couldn’t get a shot to go down but we stayed in it because we were able to guard.
“But the missed shots wore us down. You can’t consistently shoot 30 percent and expect your energy to be good.”
UNO led by as many as 24 with 8:16 remaining before MSU cut it to 13 in the final 75 seconds.
And while UNO rolled offensively, MSU junior guard Tyler Hall had perhaps the worst night of his explosive career.
Montana State junior Tyler Hall
The Rock Island, Illinois native missed his first 14 shots, including eight 3-point tries, and did not score for the first 33 minutes, seven seconds. Shortly before, Hall missed a short floater in the lane and then a put-back layup attempt with 9:14 remaining and the Bobcats trailing by 22. The dynamic scorer, so used to seeing the ball go through the hoop in bunches, could only double over, tug at his shorts and wonder what it was going to take to get one to drop.
When he finally did, on a 3 from the right wing off an in-bound play, the Mavericks had already had the game in a vice grip for several minutes.
“It’s something that doesn’t happen very often, but it’s something that we need to work through,” Neumann said of Hall’s off night. “When Tyler doesn’t make shots, we need to pick him up.”
Overall, the 6-foot-5 Hall missed 17 of 19 and finished with six points.
“We put a lot of pressure on that guy,” junior guard Devonte Kines said. “I don’t feel like that’s why we lost the game. We all missed shots and we all didn’t play good defense.”
Added Fish, “He just had a night where it didn’t go in. I’ve coached him now for 60-plus games and there haven’t been a lot of nights like that. I thought a lot of them were good shots and he lost his confidence a little bit there. We just have to get him back and he’s got to see the ball go through the net.”
RELATED: Omaha 84, Montana State 71 (click for final box score)
It was not the kind of night the fourth-year head coach wanted before a long layoff, particularly in the city where he coached six seasons as a Creighton assistant and still has many friends and family.
More than that, though, the lopsided loss showed that this veteran team still has plenty of questions on the eve of conference play. MSU now waits a week before opening its Big Sky slate in Cedar City, Utah against a rejuvenated Southern Utah program that ended the Bobcats’ 2016-17 campaign, 109-105 in triple overtime in Reno during last spring’s league tournament quarterfinals and has already matched that season’s win total at 6-5 this fall under second-year head coach Todd Simon.
Montana State head coach Brian Fish
On this night, the Bobcats missed 24 of 33 from 3-point range and shot 33 percent overall.
“They’re young people and anybody that’s not going to make shots, it’s going to affect them at some point on both ends of the floor,” Fish said.
MSU is off the next few days and reconvenes Christmas Day in Bozeman.
“It’s something that we can get away and reflect a little and think about what we did wrong and figure out ways to fix it,” Neumann said. “We’re going to come back ready to go. We definitely took some steps but we’re not there yet. We’re not far away from it, but we’re not entirely there yet. We need to pick it up, all come together and we’ll be fine in conference play.”
The Bobcats got an early lift from senior wing Konner Frey that helped make up for a slow start. They missed their first eight shots and trailed 7-0 coming out of the first media timeout, but the Bountiful, Utah native scored five straight to spark a 10-2 run.
The teams traded baskets through the middle part of the first half and tied the game on a Keljin Blevins tip-in at 8:39. But then the Mavericks ripped off a 9-0 run over 1:41 to tie their largest lead of the night at 27-18 before sophomore point guard Harald Frey (team-best 20 points) knocked in his second three of the night.
Omaha relied on leading scorer Zach Jackson and Lamar Wofford-Humphrey in the early going, as the pair scored 20 of the host’s 25. That pair and JT Gibson combined for 58 points overall on 23-of-36 shooting.
Jackson finished with a game-best 25 on 9-of-11 and added nine rebounds.
Down the stretch in the first half, though, the Bobcats stopped getting consistent defensive stops and UNO attacked relentlessly.
The Mavericks hit 10 of 11 shots over the final 7:03 into halftime, including their last seven, capped by a Jackson 3 in front of MSU senior wing Zach Green at the buzzer for a 41-28 intermission lead.
“We were relying on our offensive game to win the game rather than defensively locking in and knowing what we’re supposed to do – knowing when to switch ,knowing when to get up on the man,” Klines said. “I feel like tonight defensively we just didn’t not have good effort.”
In the first half UNO shot 66.7 percent from the floor.
Outside of Frey’s 4-of-7 shooting, including 3-of-5 from beyond the arc, MSU made just 7 of 26 in the first half and missed 8 of 10 3s.
Blevins, the junior Southern Mississippi transfer, logged his first career double-double with 12 points and 10 rebounds, while senior Joe Mvuezolo Jr. finished with 16 and Konner Frey 10.
“(Blevins) has taken strides,” Fish said. “He’s a guy that sat out (last year), took eight or nine games to get back and he’s coming better with energy and doing those things. That’s improvement and it’s something that we have to build on.”
Parker Gabriel covers Nebraska football for the Lincoln Journal Star. He covered Montana State men’s basketball for the Bozeman Chronicle for three seasons before moving to the Cornhusker State.
