(Huntsville, TX) Few teams will defend Sam Houston’s top scorers, Savion Flagg and Demarkus Lampley, as well as Grand Canyon did Saturday.
But few team come away from Bernard G. Johnson Coliseum with a win either. The Lopes held the Bearkats to 32.8% shooting and limited Flagg and Lampley to 15 points less than their cumulative average, but extending Sam Houston to the buzzer still left GCU on the short side of a 58-56 conference loss.
Lopes head coach Bryce Drew, cleared from health and safety protocols, arrived about an hour prior to game time to rejoin his team, which was coming off a 71-46 loss at Stephen F. Austin on Thursday. GCU (14-4, 5-2 WAC) looked more like the team that went six weeks without losing when it built a 27-18 lead late in the first half.
“I was really proud of our guys,” Drew said. “We competed. We’re banged up. It’s been a long trip. We’ve had so many distractions these last three-four days. We’ve got two players out (Taeshon Cherry and Jayden Stone) that have been playing really well for us lately. It hurt our rotation. I was really proud of the effort and the fight. We had that one lapse for five minutes at the start of the second half and that lapse gave them the momentum. We fought back still, though, and took the lead.
“This game and this effort they gave tonight is going to help us later in the year.”
Graduate forward Sean Miller-Moore led the effort to keep Flagg, a national top-20 scorer, to 6-for-19 shooting from the field and 0-for-4 work on 3-pointers. But the Bearkats (12-9, 7-1 WAC) overcame their offensive struggles to move to 72-11 at home over the past six seasons.
“Collectively, it was a great team effort,” Drew said. “We gave up too many offensive rebounds (15), but I really liked how hard our guys played.”
GCU had its inefficiencies, shooting 38.9% from the field and losing its second-half lead when Sam Houston went on an 11-0 run for its largest lead, 51-43, with 8:10 remaining in the game. The Lopes clawed back by holding the Bearkats without a field goal for five minutes. But even as Flagg did not score for the final 6:40, Sam Houston survived GCU pulling even on a baseline drive by junior guard Jovan Blacksher Jr. for a 54-54 tie with 1:54 remaining.
After converting one of two free throws with 20.5 seconds remaining, Sam Houston led 58-56 but had only been called for three fouls in the half. The Bearkats used two fouls to give, taking the clock down to 4.8 seconds.
With the Lopes inbounding on the right sideline, Miller-Moore passed to graduate guard Holland Woods II, who split two defenders and bounced into open space for a 17-foot jumper that missed off the back rim at the buzzer.
Blacksher (6 for 17) and Woods (3 for 13) shot a combined 30% from the field but only made two turnovers combined despite each play 37 minutes. Going without reserves Taeshon Cherry (ankle) and Jayden Stone (ill), GCU mainly used a seven-man rotation with junior Gabe McGlothan logging 38 minutes as the only available stretch power forward.
GCU allowed 15 offensive rebounds to help give Sam Houston 10 more field goal attempts, but the Bearkats only converted the boards for eight second-chance points. Flagg went 6 for 19 from the field and Lampley was 1 for 8 but the Lopes offense followed up the program’s second-lowest scoring Division I-era game on Thursday (46 points) with a 24-point second half on Saturday.
Blacksher broke DeWayne Russell’s Divison I-era program record for career steals with two on Saturday to give him 121. It was Woods’ second steal that set up a fastbreak ending in a Miller-Moore follow when GCU was rallying late in the game, but Sam Houston only made seven turnovers in the game.
Part of GCU’s success came in a 2-3 zone with senior power forward Dima Zdor patrolling the back middle. Zdor became the only Lopes player besides Oscar Frayer to block three shots in consecutive Division I-era games. Another power forward, junior Yvan Ouedraogo, led GCU’s rebounding with nine boards in 25 minutes.
GCU has a week of preparation for next Saturday’s game at New Mexico State (16-3, 6-1 WAC), which won Saturday at Stephen F. Austin.
“We’ve got to get healthy first,” Drew said. “We’ve got some guys playing who are banged up and aren’t who they were before they came on this trip.
“We weren’t sharp. We didn’t play great. We weren’t who we are. But their grit and their toughness allowed us to stay in the game and have a chance to win.”
Saturday’s loss marked the end of a trying week for Drew, who watched his team from Phoenix as he went through health and safety protocols before he could return just before tip-off Saturday.
“It’s hard,” Drew said. “It’s so hard watching. What’s really hard is you work so hard all summer. You work so hard in the fall. You get ready for league games and then you have so much disruption. ”
Press Release courtesy of Grand Canyon University Athletics
