Lee helps revitalize offense
Until Sunday, Marcus Lee’s career-best game was a 17point effort that came four years ago this week, when he was playing for Kentucky and against North Carolina-Asheville.
“No. No idea,” Lee said when asked about his memories from the game. “I can probably say it was a home game, because UNC-Nashville? I mean, Asheville.
“I tend not to look backward. I try to look at the now, and right now, my team is doing really well and we’re bonding really well.”
Lee is a big reason Cal was able to bounce back from an ugly opener with an 85-82 victory over visiting Cal Poly, a game that didn’t feel that close and marked the first victory of Wyking Jones’ head-coaching career.
About as close as it got until the meaningless closing seconds was when Cal nursed a five-point lead that had been trimmed from 19. At that point, Lee followed up a missed layup by Darius McNeill with an emphatic dunk to give the Bears a 78-71 lead with 1½ minutes left.
It was the defining play of a career day by Lee, a 6-foot-11 forward who sat out last season after transferring from Kentucky. He had 11 rebounds and a career-high 21 points and helped the Bears beat Cal Poly 42-24 in paint points and 31-18 on the glass.
“Marcus just told us to give him the ball,” guard Don Coleman said. “The first game, we didn’t give him the ball. … He made sure to say, ‘Play through me. Give me the ball.’ That’s what we did.”
Coleman scored a game-high 30 points on 8-for-13 shooting from the floor, becoming the first Cal player to post back-toback 30-point games since Ryan Anderson in 2008. Center Kinglsey Okoroh had a career-high 15 points, and Justice Sueing added 12 points in his first start.
It all added up in a nice bounce-back performance from Cal (1-1), which lost by 18 points to UC Riverside on Friday. After shooting 30 percent from the floor and totaling seven assists in the opener, the Bears shot 56 percent with 14 assists against Cal Poly (0-2).
“With a team that’s so young and so new, going from a loss to a win is huge,” Lee said.
The Mustangs got 19 points on 5-for-5 three-point shooting from Marcellus Garrick, 18 points and six assists from Donovan Fields and 15 points from Victor Joseph before he fouled out, but it wasn’t enough to hang with a determined Cal team.
The Bears recorded their eighth assist 11½ minutes into Sunday’s game, sparking a 9-0 run that extended their lead to 36-22 with about five minutes to play in the first half.
Cal Poly, which led the nation with only 9.62 turnovers per game during the past five seasons, already had committed 10 turnovers just two minutes into the second half. The messy play seemed to spark the Mustangs, however, as they made five three-pointers in a five-minute span to trim a 19-point deficit to 58-49 with 12:30 left in the game.