Lobo men come up dry on trip to Reno
No huge comeback is necessary this time
RENO, Nev. — The best team in the Mountain West didn’t need a miraculous comeback Saturday on its home court.
The Nevada Wolf Pack scored 20 points off 17 UNM turnovers and got 26 points from sophomore Cameron Oliver in an 82-65 win over the New Mexico Lobos
to retain sole possession of first place in the Mountain West Conference halfway through the league season.
And the announced attendance of 10,727 in the Lawlor Events Center was certainly worthy of a game with first place and conference bragging rights on the line.
“We turned the ball over, and I thought that we didn’t make some shots that we’d been making. But 17 turnovers — we’re not going to win on the road,” said Lobos head coach Craig Neal. “I didn’t think we had the same edge that we’ve had on the road. I think some of our guys who are role players, the guys on the peripheral, not our (primary scoring) two guys, I think they looked a little timid. This was a big atmosphere playing for first place. Some of them hadn’t been here.”
UNM (13-9, 6-4) got 18 points apiece from Elijah Brown and Tim Williams, who combined to shoot 46.4 percent from the field on 13 made shots. The rest of the Lobos roster (nine other Lobos played) combined for 29 points on 9-of-27 (33.3 percent) shooting.
Freshman point guard Jalen Harris, who was the third leading UNM scorer on Saturday with seven points, couldn’t stay on the floor long, with foul trouble limiting him to 19 minutes.
Nevada, meanwhile, proved again that the Lobos’ kryptonite is defending the 3-point line, especially when a team can hit shots from the perimeter from all five positions on the floor.
The Wolf Pack (18-4, 7-2) was 11-for-23 on 3-pointers and had at least one made 3 from all five starters, with Oliver — recently challenged in a player’s-only meeting in Reno to step his game up — hitting three of them and senior Marcus Marshall hitting three more.
A Brown floater in the lane cut Nevada’s lead to 64-58 with 6:25
remaining in the game. Then Oliver drained his third 3 of the game followed on consecutive Pack possessions by Marshall triples for a 73-58 lead, a 9-0 run that ended UNM’s hopes of an upset.
Nevada’s ability to score in bunches zapped any possible momentum swings in UNM’s favor with runs in the game of 11-0, 9-0, 8-0, 8-0 and 7-0. For the most part, opponents in UNM’s recent four-game win streak were unable to string together such runs.
“These guys did,” Neal said. “They’re potent that way . ... They hit three in a row that hurt us. When they go five guys out who can shoot 3s, that’s a problem.”
The first of Nevada’s 11 3’s came with 17:46 left in the first half on a banked shot from Jordan Caroline, who scored his team’s first nine points and had 20 in the game.
Both shots were eerily reminiscent of the Jan. 7 game in the Pit in which the Lobos led by 25 points in the second half before Nevada hit seven consecutive 3-pointers in the final 1:49 of regulation — the final two banked in — to force overtime, where it won 105-104 on a Caroline game-winning 3 with 2 seconds left. That gave him a Pit opponent scoring record of 45 points.
But the similarities to the that historic Jan. 7 game would stop there. UNM used an 8-0 run of its own to take a 13-9 lead early, and play fairly even basketball throughout the first half (Nevada scored the final four points of the period for a 37-31 lead at the break).
The Pack shot 56 percent in the second half and outrebounded UNM 18-12 in the final 20 minutes.
“We’ve got to regroup and get ready to play our next one,” said Neal, whose team plays at UNLV on Wednesday. “We’ve been playing really good, winning basketball. We just didn’t play very well today. It’s not the way we expect to play. It’s not the way we’ve been playing. We’ll get back to work. We’re still here. We’re still right there. I’m proud of what these guys have done.”
NOTES: Former UNM assistant coach Chris Walker was on the call as an analyst for CBS Sports Network on Saturday in Reno, the second weekend in a row the network had a former Lobo as the analyst. On Jan. 21, former player Danny Granger called the Wyoming game in the Pit . ...
Saturday marked the third consecutive victory for Nevada in the series, which is led by UNM 6-4. The previous three Nevada wins over the Lobos were by a combined six points . ...
Nevada hit 26 3-pointers (13.0 per game) vs. UNM this season. In UNM’s eight other MWC games, opponents are hitting 7.4 per game . ...
The 20 points scored by Nevada off turnovers matched a season worst for UNM.