With 5:28 to play, Blair potted a huge three to strengthen the Bulldog control to 15 at 50-35. It's not even that the game hit some kind of stalemate- UMD was still building upon its lead. It just seems like the minutes, the seconds, can't move any faster. That's when Blair potted a jumper to bolster UMD's advantage all the way into double figures for the first time all game at 44-33. It was a gradual process (one built by many two+ possession advantages) but at the 10:55 mark, it really bore fruit. remember that innocuous 17-15 lead Katona helped the Bulldogs take back in the first? Past that point, UMD wouldn't trail the rest of the night.Īnd it wasn't just that the Bulldogs were able to cling tight to marginal leads through 20+ minutes- UMD got to work at building up some real distance instead. In short, there were lots of basketball left to be played, so many different ways that things could shake out. Regardless of how good UMD had grown to be at guarding the arc in March, it seemed unlikely that the Storm would go just 2-9 from that arena again. But would such a thing be sustainable? Could something similar happen for the Storm down the stretch? After-all, this was a team that came into Tuesday with the 2nd best three-point shooting clip in the entire country at 41.1%. In a strange bit of deviation from the themes of the contest, the Bulldogs had actually shot lights-out from deep through 20 minutes, going 5-9. That's the game you play when points are so hard to come by on either side. In a game like this, a four-point lead can simultaneously be the greatest safe haven in the world and the most unstable structure one could ever imagine. On the other end, two Storm players closed the half with seven points, those being Javon Jackson and Nick Davis. Meister, on the other hand, continued to be a monster, already sitting with more two blocks through 20 minutes. Joshua Brown had five, but he also had four rebounds and two assists. No player across either team found themselves in double figures for scoring yet. The stats through 20 minute certainly reflect a tight ballgame. Three free throws across two trips from Austin Andrews and Lincoln Meister pushed the lead up to two possessions at 27-23 by the end of the half. It'd bulk up to as high as six at 24-18 leading up to the break before shrinking back down to as low as one at 24-23. Nothing out of the ordinary- just a slim lead. With exactly 6:55 left in the first frame, Charlie Katona sank a three-ball to reclaim an advantage for UMD at 17-15. Just under three minutes later, a Manny Dixon layup was sealing the deal on a 5-0 SNU stretch that allowed it to reclaim the lead at 15-14. But a sudden Storm surge would put an end to this. That was UMD's way of countering what had been a 7-2 start for SNU. ![]() It was a formula that was to this point favoring the Bulldogs, as they led by what was then a game-high of five at 14-9. ![]() At the 10:57 mark, just 23 total points had been scored between the two teams. It became clear pretty quickly what a collision course between these two forces was going to look like. Across two games in the tournament, UMD was seventh across the postseason field in opposing field goal percentage (37%) and 12th in opposing three-point percentage (28.6%). In the case of the Bulldogs, their defense seemed to be getting hot at just the right time. That was the third-lowest mark in the entire country. The Storm have been a defensive unit all season, boasting an overall scoring defense heading into this game that had held clubs to an average of just 57.6 points. Tuesday's contest was far from an offensive shootout- but really, such a thing shouldn't have been expected to begin with. It's the very first time this has happened for an NSIC program, just the 13th time it's occurred across the DII field at-large. 5 Southern Nazarene 62-52 in the Central Regional Final on Tuesday, March 14 to lock down an inaugural Elite Eight berth of their own. ![]() Maryville, Mo.- One day removed from the women's program sealing a spot in the Elite Eight back in Romano, the University of the Minnesota Duluth men's basketball team followed suit in Missouri.
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