Zags Nearly Miss The Point In Win Over Townsville

His team had just held on to a slim exhibition win over a touring pro team from Australia and coach Dan Fitzgerald’s face was sucked up into a scowl as profound as that guy in the commercial who is plagued by bitter-beer face.

“Whew, we got a lotta work to do,” the Gonzaga men’s basketball coach said Sunday after his team escaped with a 69-65 win over the Townsville Suns.

“Our perimeter play was terrible, we got absolutely no play from the perimeter,” he said.

Point guards Kyle Dixon and John Nemeth totaled only 11 points at the cost of nine turnovers - an effort that derailed the Bulldog offense, Fitzgerald said.

“It’s hard for us, with what we run, to play well when we’re that inconsistent at the point position,” Fitzgerald said.

Dixon is the Bulldogs’ lone returning all-conference player, but his seven turnovers and 5-for-12 free-throw shooting showed he’s not nearly at the level of performance he displayed down the stretch last year.

“Seven turnovers is like a month’s worth for us at point,” Fitzgerald said. “But he’ll come out of that, he’s a much better player than that.”

The Suns, who play in the Australian equivalent of the NBA, were competing in their fifth game in seven days. Wearing bright orange, red and blue uniforms plastered with advertisements, they looked like human stock cars.

Trouble for them arose, though, when leading scorer Clarence Tyson had to pull into the pits 9 minutes into the game with his third foul.

Because of foul trouble, he played only 25 minutes and his 11 points were 16 below his average on this tour.

“That hurt us quite a bit, with him in foul trouble,” Suns coach Mark Braggs said.

Guard Cameron Dickinson picked up the slack, though, and scored 29 points with five 3-pointers.

On the up side for Fitzgerald, was the scoring of senior forward Jon Kinloch (21 points) and the interior play of Paul Rogers (15 points).

Shooting guard Lorenzo Rollins, a junior-college transfer, finished with 10 points and hinted of considerable potential.

In a stretch of just more than a minute in the first half, Rollins netted two 3-pointers, forced a turnover and made a nice assist on a Kinloch basket.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing out there yet,” Fitzgerald said. “He made some mistakes but he actually played pretty good.”

Luckily for the Bulldogs, the Suns flamed out from the free-throw line, making only 12 of 25 attempts.

The Bulldogs, meanwhile, finished with an uncharacteristically low field-goal percentage of 40.7.

“It was a good game for us because we know more about our team,” Fitzgerald said. “But you just can’t get anything going when you turn the ball over that much.”

, DataTimes