(By HOWARD TSUMURA, varsityletters.ca)
Luke Howard’s final basket of the night on Thursday did a lot to prove the notion that the Simon Fraser Red Leafs’ two-game home sweep last week at the hands of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference’s two Alaska schools didn’t come in vain.
In fact when Howard set a high screen for teammate Irish Coquia and then stepped back over the three-point arc to receive a pass from his point guard with nine minutes remaining in the second half, and the Red Leafs seemingly on the verge of a road win against Montana State Billings, time seemed to stand still for just a shade over a split second.
That’s because Howard, SFU’s 6-foot-9 junior forward/centre, had already hit on five of seven three-point attempts.
Surely he was going to rear back and try to hit his sixth trey with the Red Leafs looking to build on a 60-50 lead… wasn’t he?
Instead, with the Yellow Jackets’ 6-foot-7 New Zealand import Kael Robinson squared up to guard him, the Abbotsford native Howard put the ball on the deck, blew past his defender and laid down an emphatic dunk which not only capped his 29-point performance but left little doubt that SFU was headed for its first conference win of the season, a soon-to-be 82-67 victory.
The win lifted SFU to 5-10 overall and 1-4 in GNAC play, while MSU-B dropped to 11-6, 2-2.
“I just thought our defensive pressure against their best players was really good,” said Red Leafs’ head coach Steve Hanson via phone from Billings.
“We have been doing some good things the last couple of games and we’ve just got to stick to the process a little bit to get rewarded.”
On a night when Howard’s 29 points moved him into the GNAC’s overall (including non-conference) scoring lead at 17.8 ppg, Coquia was right there with him.
The sophomore sensation out of Vancouver-St. Pat’s had 17 points, nine rebounds, a pair of steals and seven assists against just two turnovers as he played 33 minutes against the Jackets’ ball-hawking schemes.
“Luke had a big game and Irish played well, probably one of the most mature games he has played for me,” said Hanson as Coquia moved into seventh place in overall GNAC scoring at 16.3 ppg.
Billings put on the press early and that led to transition points early for SFU, and all the while Coquia never cracked.
Then, reserve guard Jovan Rai, who was splendid throughout, passed the ball to Howard who hit a triple with four seconds remaining in the half which sent SFU to the lockers with a 42-39 lead.
“In the second half they zoned us and Irish settled us down and got us into the actions we run against 2-3 zone,” continued Hanson. “I can’t say that we were great against their zone, but once we got up to a nine-or-10 point lead, we slowed the game down to our favour and did a great job of managing the clock.”
Mostly, however, it was the job SFU did in guarding the opposition three-point line that Hanson felt was most responsible for the win.
“I think that was the biggest thing tonight,” he added. “They have three or four really high-percentage shooters and we really guarded the three-point line. If you look at us versus Anchorage and Fairbanks we were poor guarding the three-point line.”
The numbers indeed spoke volumes.
SFU yielded a combined 28-for-67 (42 per cent) three-point shooting performance in a 94-87 loss to the Seawolves and a 76-74 loss to Fairbanks.
By comparison, the Red Leafs held the Yellowjackets to 6-of-29 (21 per cent) from three-point range on Thursday while drilling the three-ball themselves at a 61 per cent (11-of-18) clip.
Hanson credited a total team performance from a nine-man rotation for the success, highlighting the ways in which Rai and fellow guard Terique Brown solidified the team’s goals with their perimetre defence and the ways back-up post Sasha Vujisic ably spelled off Howard at key moments.
“It was just a mature game by the whole team,” said Hanson, whose charges play Saturday (2 p.m.) at Seattle Pacific before returning home this coming Thursday (7 p.m.) to open a two-game homestand against Western Oregon.
The SFU women’s team was never able to find a groove Thursday at home, dropping an 82-70 decision to Central Washington and falling to 2-3 in GNAC play ahead of its 1 p.m. Saturday home game against Northwest Nazarene.
Senior guard Sophia Wisotzki, the GNAC’s leading scorer at 24.5 ppg, finished with a game-high 27 points in the loss.
Although it’s not known to be any kind of an official first, SFU has the GNAC’s leading overall scorers currently in both men’s and women’s basketball with Luke Howard and Sophia Wisotzki.
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