THUNDER BAY – Bad starts barely bode well.
The Lakehead Thunderwolves men’s basketball team got off to a doozy of one on Friday night, allowing McMaster’s Mychael Paulo to seemingly score at will while opening up a 14-point lead. Paolo was on fire in the first, putting up 14 of his 18 points.
The Wolves never really recovered, trailing the 81-71 contest wire-to-wire, though they did manage to make things interesting in the fourth quarter, despite trailing by as many as 17 in the second half.
LU coach Ryan Thomson said his team, ranked eighth in the nation, simply came out flat-footed against a Marauders squad that entered play at the C.J. Sanders Fieldhouse at 2-4.
“The first five minutes of the game we didn’t play the way we intended to, with urgency, with impact with the ball. We didn’t play to the level that we’re trying to play to,” said Thomson, whose team was not outscored in any of the final three quarters.
“I think it was evident, obviously, by us giving up 30 in the first quarter.”
After closing an early six-point gap to two on a pair of Michael Okafor free throws, the Marauders took hold of the opening quarter, going on an 11-0 run that featured a pair of Paulo three-pointers – the only two he’d hit on the night.
Brendan Amoyaw put a stamp on the first, a period that saw McMaster hit 11-of-17 from the field, a 64.7 per cent clip, burying a three before the buzzer to open up a 14-point gap. It stayed that way through halftime.
Dylan Morrison, who led Lakehead with 16 points and 11 rebounds, opened the third with a powerful dunk off a Chume Nwigwe pass, and by the midway point of the period they had cut the difference to 10. A Morrison put-back of a Javier Fernandez shot made it a 56-48 game, but McMaster pulled away again, going up by as many as 13 before an Alston Harris drive made it a 63-53 Marauders lead after three.
Okafor set Morrison up for a thunderous alley-oop two-and-a-half minutes into the fourth, and three minutes later Okafor went to the line with a chance to cut the opposition lead to one, but only hit one of two and Lakehead trailed 70-67 with 4:36 to play.
Okafor was good on five-of-eight at the free-throw line on the night, finishing with 12 points.
McMaster’s Tyler Garcia put the nail in the coffin with a three minutes to play, dropping a turnaround jumper from three-point territory that gave his side a nine-point lead. Nathan Bilamu would cut it to seven, but that’s as close at Lakehead would get.
“These guys aren’t going to take losing well. They haven’t at any point,” Thomson said. “In the back of everybody’s minds was last year they eliminated us in the playoffs. Sometimes when you have that emotion going into the game, it cause a distraction more than it does as motivation.
“So I think we were a little bit victim to that tonight. Our discipline, our focus wasn’t there in the first quarter and that was evident. But the rest of the game I thought it was better – the last three or four minutes of the fourth quarter not so much.”
Nineteen turnovers were far too many, Thomson added.
The two teams play again on Saturday night, with tip-off scheduled for 8 p.m.
