Day after Portland State
Where to begin the day after
Much more below.
First, the links. Here are game stories from the S-R, the Oregonian (authored by the S-R’s Dave Trimmer), the Tacoma News Tribune and Seattle P-I carried the same article from a stringer, and A.P.
--
Sometimes it was as easy as stepping around a ball screen for Dominguez to get an open look. With four minutes left, he ran down a rebound and buried a clutch 3-pointer. He did that at the 13-minute mark, too. He also had a nifty pass fake that freed him from defender Jeremy Pargo and he cooly hit a 3-pointer.
“We run a motion offense; it’s kind of scrambled,” Dominguez said. “I seemed to be open the majority of the time and I hit some shots.”
PSU was 12 of 31 from beyond the 3-point line. That stat was one of many that disappointed Gonzaga coach Mark Few.
“He’s a terrific player,” Few said of Dominguez. “He really understands how to play the game, and if you let him make 3s, like we did, then he can really be effective. He shoots a higher percentage from 3 than 2. We had talked at length for two days not to allow him to get any 3s off. So, there you have it.”
Gonzaga guard Matt Bouldin said Dominguez “is a player. It’s not like the coaches didn’t prepare us. We did everything pretty much the coaches told us not to.”
--There was plenty of talk afterward from the players that they simply didn’t take
“We like to talk about Zag effort; it wasn’t a Zag effort at all,” Pargo said. “We played lackadaisical. We gave up a lot of shots. We didn’t do things we talked about in practice.
“We got out there and just played like we didn’t want to play. Anytime you have an opportunity to play basketball it’s always a gift and we didn’t take advantage of it.”
Said Bouldin: “When a team comes out and plays with more fire than we do, it should hurt us. We definitely didn’t come out with the same fire we have been. You could see it in our faces in warm-ups. That should never happen, especially after a loss like UConn. It’s not going to sit well in my stomach over the (holiday) break.”
--Few juggled the lineup to start the second half. Steven Gray started in place of Micah Downs, who was scoreless while playing 11 first-half minutes. Gray then went scoreless in the second half and
The discussion at half was “just that we played lazy,” Josh Heytvelt said. “He (Few) got into us and yelled a little bit, like a coach should in those situations, and told us we needed to go out and play like we usually do. And we didn’t.”
“We’ve got 20 minutes to fix what we did,” Bouldin said of the halftime message. “We were all pretty embarrassed with that first half.”
--Few didn’t sugarcoat his post-game analysis.
“You can’t fix anything if you don’t have effort and energy,” he said. “Execution doesn’t matter. Yeah, execution was poor, but our defense was horrendous, our rebounding was horrendous. You have to get that shored up before you can worry about the other things.”
More Few: “We’d have three guys playing hard and two that weren’t or four guys that were alert and one that wasn’t.
--Rebounding was one of the telling stats. PSU won the glass 39-30, 13-8 on the offensive glass. The Vikings' starting five measured 5-6, 6-2, 6-7, 6-7, 6-8. GU’s first unit stands 6-2, 6-5, 6-8, 6-11, 6-11. PSU’s tallest player is 6-8 Kyle Coston.
“I think our offensive and defensive rebounding won the game,” Dominguez said. “Limiting them to one shot with a bunch of bigger guys, and we tried to stop their fastbreak points.”
Austin Daye led Gonzaga with nine boards and Heytvelt had eight.
“We were slow to everything,” Daye said. “We weren’t our usual selves. Myself, I made some dumb plays, plays I usually don’t make. I missed a dunk (with 5:31 left), I missed a five-footer at the end of the game (with 1:14 remaining). As a whole, we didn’t execute like we needed to and come out with fire in the first half.”
“They shoot a lot of long shots and we just did a poor job of getting the long rebounds,” Heytvelt said.
PSU came in plus 2.7 per game in rebounding; GU plus 4.4.
“That was huge,” Vikings coach Ken Bone said. “That was highlighted in our scout. They are a big team, they’re aggressive and they’re on their home floor. We just had to do something about being as hungry as possible and being aggressive and a few of our guys did that.”
Dominguez, who had seven offensive rebounds in nine games, came up with three on the offensive end and three on the defensive end.
--Make no mistake, the Vikings are a quality team. They won 23 games overall and the Big Sky title last season before falling to eventual national champion
They already have wins over teams from Conference
Next up for PSU:
EWU 68, No. 10 St. Joseph’s 67 2001 in
--With students on holiday break, the atmosphere inside the MAC was subdued. There were perhaps 200 students wedged into a small section near the east baseline. One of the loudest cheers came at halftime when a fan’s half-court shot swirled the rim but didn't go in.
There wasn’t much noise in the building until the final 3-4 minutes. Then again, the fans didn’t have a whole lot to get excited about.
“That was the least of our problems tonight,” Few said. “We talked about creating our own energy anyway. That’s what we have to do on the road or in neutral court games. It all starts with us.”