UC Santa Barbara too much for EWU

Eastern Washington University did a lot of things right against the UC Santa Barbara Saturday night, particularly on the defensive end of the court where they made Gauchos’ scoring leader Alex Harris earn every one of his 18 points.

But in the end, an obvious lack of offensive firepower – which led to several prolonged field-goal droughts – proved to be too much to overcome as the Eagles let UCSB slip out of Reese Court with a 58-51 non-conference men’s basketball win that snapped their three-game winning streak.

Senior forward Kellen Williams finished with a game-high 23 points and 10 rebounds for EWU (6-9 overall) and also fueled a late 7-2 run that pulled his team to within 54-50 with 3 1/2 minutes left. But the Gauchos (11-2) held the Eagles without a field goal the rest of the way, sending the majority of those in a crowd of 1,293 home disappointed.

Eastern, which also got 11 points and a splendid defensive effort from freshman guard Trey Gross, struggled through two prolonged scoring droughts in the first half, missed its first eight shots after intermission and shot a paltry 32.2 percent (19 of 59) from the field, making just 8 of 31 attempts from 3-point range.

Afterward, first-year Eagles coach Kirk Earlywine refrained from trying to put any kind of positive spin on the loss.

“I told our guys if I was an optimist, which I’m not, I could say that we shot less than 40 percent for the second game in a row and still had a chance to win at the end,” he said. “But I chose to look at it in terms of, ‘Can we get better, are we taking good shots and are we getting the right players shots?’

“And I told our guys that some of them need to get in here and get extra shooting in.”

Against the Gauchos, sophomore guard Gary Gibson, who helped Gross defend against Harris and hold him to four points less than his season scoring average of 22 a game, made just 1 of 10 basket tries. Junior point guard Adris DeLeon finished 1 for 7 from the field, and Gross made only 4 of 14 field-goal attempts.

“It’s becoming evident that we’re going to be in a bunch of grinders – games that are going to end up being one- or two-possession games that are going to be a coin toss at the last media timeout,” Earlywine said. “Every mistake is magnified in those kinds of games and every bucket is bigger.”

On this night, the Eagles made too many mistakes and failed to capitalize on several scoring opportunities in the final 3 minutes, when they missed two free throws, two field-goal attempts and turned the ball over twice.

“We just didn’t shoot it very well,” said Williams, who made 9 of 15 basket tries and pulled down seven offensive rebounds to post his seventh double-double of the season.

“We took too many 3s and didn’t run our plays very well, either.”

Santa Barbara, whose only losses have come to Stanford and North Carolina, shot 47.8 percent (22 of 46) from the field. Harris finished just 5 for 12 from the field, but made 6 of 10 free throws.

“He may well be a late-round NBA draft pick,” Earlywine said of the Gauchos’ 6-foot-6 shooting guard. “I thought we did a good job on him from the 3-point line – he was shooting over 50 percent from there. But we put him at the foul line ten times.

“Our goal was to guard the heck out of him, but without fouling, and we only accomplished half of the task.”

Of Williams’ big night, which came in the wake of his being named the Big Sky’s player of the week on Tuesday, Earlywine added, “Kellen has been a workhorse, but I’ve pointed it out to him that it’s going to become tougher as the season wears on.

“He has gone from a 14- or 15-minute role player a year ago to a guy who is the focus of the other team’s scouting report. It’s going to be harder and harder for him, but he is more than able to step up to that challenge.”

UCSB took advantage of two prolonged Eastern scoring droughts to forge a 33-28 halftime lead. The Gauchos, who got eight first-half points from Harris, started slowly and were down 7-4 when the Eagles hit their first dry spell, going 4 minutes, 11 seconds without a point.

Still, Santa Barbara was unable to get much in the way of separation and was leading by only 11-9 when Milan Stanojevic hit a 3-pointer from the left wing to ignite an 11-4 Eastern run that produced a 20-15 lead. But after Williams capped the run with another 3-pointer from the left corner, the Eagles missed their next eight shots and went just more than 5 minutes before Williams, who finished with 12 first-half points, finally got them another field goal, this one coming on leaner from just inside the free-throw line.