Chippewas 1-1 in MAC after EMU win
A whole lot of matchin’ going on.
And the Central Michigan men’s basketball team will take it and run with it.
Travon Broadway Jr. scored 21 points and Meikkel Murray added 18 on Tuesday as the Chippewas won going away at Eastern Michigan, 87- 60.
It was CMU’S fifth win in its last six starts as it improved to 5- 4, 1-1 Mid-american Conference. The Eagles are 2-3, 0-2.
Both Broadway and Murray matched their career best scoring totals and the 27-point margin of victory was CMU’S largest over Eastern Michigan since January, 1987, when the Dan Majerle-led Chippewas also won by 27, 91- 64, in Mount Pleasant.
“Being able to get a road win is important,” CMU coach Keno Davis said. “They’re all important. Beating Eastern Michigan – everybody knows that they routinely beat some of the best
teams on their schedule each and every year — and to come in here and be able to do it on the road is definitely special.”
The Chippewas have often struggled against the Eagles’ zone defense, but on Tuesday they controlled the game nearly from the get-go, leading 33-28 at halftime.
CMU broke it open with a 21-3 run that started with a Caleb Huffman layup with 8:58 remaining, putting CMU up 10, 56- 46. With just over four minutes left to play, Huffman made two free throws to extend CMU’S lead to 75- 49.
Rather than living and dying by the 3-point shot, as is often the strategy for opponents when they face Eastern Michigan, the Chippewas turned up the pres
sure early to force tempo and then worked the ball inside to the likes of Murray and Broadway who used their athleticism to score from in close or get to the free throw line.
“It was good for us defensively to wear them out and take some time off the clock even if we weren’t getting the turnovers,” Davis said. “Sometimes it’s about being able to disrupt what they do, and I thought our guys were really good in it.”
Broadway scored 17 of his points in the second half, and Matt Beachler benefited from CMU’S inside-outside approach, knocking down four 3-pointers en route to 13 points to tie his season high.
“Against their zone defense, really you’ve got to be able to attack inside and then when they collapse, we were able to kick it to a Matt Beachler or somebody else on the perimeter for an open 3 and not just shoot a 25-, 26-foot 3 that a lot of teams against Eastern Michigan end up shooting,” Davis said. “Pretty
much the same stuff that we’ve always tried to do, we just have a little bit different personnel this year.”
The numbers tell the tale of CMU’S game plan of playing at a faster pace and working the ball inside. The Chippewas finished with a 44-22 advantage in points in the paint and tallied 16 fastbreak points to the Eagles’ seven. They also outrebounded Eastern, 34-31.
The Chippewas made just 14 of their 26 free throw attempts for a .538 percentage, their second-worst performance of the season. However, they offset that by making a season-best 58.2 percent of their field goals tries. They also made 40.9 percent of their 3-point attempts, their second-best performance percentage wise from behind the long line this season.
A victory two games into the 20-game MAC schedule guarantees nothing, but it is big for the Chippewas considering that it came at Eastern Michi