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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Eagles Exhaust Exhibition Rivals

For a little more than 30 minutes Sunday night, Global Sports provided a near-perfect exhibition challenge for Eastern Washington’s inexperienced men’s basketball team.

Until midway through the second half, the traveling team of former collegiate stars gave the Eagles a variety of defensive looks and a stern up-tempo test of end-to-end, racehorse basketball.

But at about the 8-minute mark of the second half - shortly after Eastern had completed an impressive 13-2 run - Global lost interest and left many of those in a Reese Court crowd of about 300 wondering how much to read into Eastern’s lopsided 103-72 win. “They got tired,” EWU coach Steve Aggers said of the visitors, who were playing their fourth game in five nights. “But I don’t want to take anything away from our kids’ effort.

“They have some outstanding athletes, but we were quicker to the ball tonight.”

Especially when it bounced off the rim.

The Eagles, in picking up their second exhibition win, outrebounded Global Sports 59-34 and grabbed 23 offensive rebounds. Karim Scott, who led Eastern’s scoring with 21 points, was one of four Eagles with seven rebounds.

“We’ve been working pretty hard on going to the offensive board,” Aggers said, “and I thought we did a good job of that tonight.”

The Eagles also did a good job of breaking Global’s will shortly after it had pulled to within 56-53 on six unanswered points by former Fresno State star Carl Ray Harris.

Aggers called time with 10 minutes, 40 seconds left and set up a play that resulted in a 3-point basket by reserve Travis King. The shot ignited a decisive 13-2 run that put Eastern up 69-55 with just over 8 minutes remaining.

Kevin Lewis, EWU’s 6-11 transfer from Kansas State, scored six points during the surge, including two on a transition dunk, and senior reserve Luke Egan added a long fallaway jumper.

From that point on, Global quit playing and started chipping. Harris and Sam Crawford, a former All-Big West Conference point guard at New Mexico State, picked up technical fouls for displaying displeasure over the officiating and Eastern threw together another 13-point run to fuel the rout.

“We called the timeout to stop their momentum,” Aggers explained of his strategy. “Then we set up a play at our end and scored off it, and that was kind of the turning point. After that we got some offense from our defense and it was over.”

Brian Green, who played at Nevada, led Global with 24 points, but scored only two of those in the second half. The 6-3 guard scored 17 of the visitors’ first 21 points, but seemed to be on a pitch count. Coach Maury Hanks sat Green for six minutes in the half, and used him sporadically the rest of the way.

Junior transfer Rodrick McClure gave Aggers a solid game at the point by scoring 10 points and handing out eight assists. He also did a solid job of defending against Crawford’s bug-like quickness.

“I thought Rod had a nice game in leading our team,” Aggers said. “He made a few questionable decisions when the game was rag-tag in the last 8 minutes, but for the most part I thought he did a good job.

“We got better as a team last week and that was one of our main goals. We’ve made great strides, but we’re still 0-0.”

The Eagles open their regular season Friday night against Grambling in the first round of the New Mexico Lobo Classic in Albuquerque, N.M.

, DataTimes