The Cougars shot only 32.2 percent from the field on Saturday afternoon while the SMU Mustangs shot 38.2 percent. Usually when the Cougars shooting percentage has been this bad this season, they have lost. But they got the 66-60 win on Saturday because the Cougars did have an incredible night from one player. And that one player wasn’t Aubrey Coleman for once. It was Kelvin Lewis.
“I knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” Coleman said of Lewis. “It was a good feeling. But I knew it was going to happen, though.”
What finally happened, sooner or later, was that Lewis went 7-for-11 from the field in the first half including an incredible, red hot, five-for-nine from behind the three-point line as he paced his team to the 31-26 halftime lead. He cooled off a bit in the second half, but his hot streak had its intended effect, opening up the middle of the floor so that Coleman, who spent the majority of the first half on the bench, was able to drive the middle and get some freedom to score.
“We just keep getting it to Kelvin like we were doing,” Coleman said of the team’s offensive plan. “Then he makes the shot and it opens up the drives.”
Lewis finished the game with 29 of the team’s 66 points as he tied his
career high after making seven three-pointers during the game. Coleman, who had only two points on two free throws in the first half,
finished the game with 16 points as he was the team’s second-leading
scorer.
But despite Lewis’ game, the Cougars would have lost
had they not finally discovered the ability to hit free throws. And
Lewis was the key there, too, as with SMU making a desperate attempt to
get back in the game, Lewis went to the foul line four times, hitting
all four to help seal the win.
Head coach Tom Penders called
it a team win, stressing the efforts by guys like Adam Brown and Zamal
Nixon, who despite low point totals, handled key defensive assignments
and ran the offense, finding ways to shut down the SMU offense while
getting the ball to Lewis, who despite his incredible night, was
seemingly forever open for any shot that he wanted to take.
“We
did a lot of good things,” Penders said. “It was a real team effort.
Some guys struggled a little bit. And some guys came in and did a
really good job and it might not even show up in the stat sheet, like
Adam Brown did a really good job defensively. He’s coming on
defensively. I think that if he might have hit a couple in the first
half, he might have gone on a bit of tear because he’s really been
shooting well.”
But the story was Lewis.
“For the most
part, I was trying to lure them to sleep,” Lewis said. “Some of those
shots were from pretty far back, and they probably didn’t think I was
shooting. I was just trying to lure them to sleep. Because my
teammates know the spots where I like it, and I can hit it. And I
lured them to sleep.”
What might have lured SMU to sleep, more
than anything, was that for the past month, Lewis had been struggling
to score points. But Lewis didn’t let the struggling from the floor
get to him.
“There’s certain times when it’s going to happen
like that, so I try to pick up one thing, like rebounding or defense,”
he said. “I knew it would come around. I wasn’t, like, stressing
about it at all. Because I knew that I could bring my defense to the
floor, and that was what I was going to be focused on today.”
It’s
been a stressful couple of weeks for the team. There was a losing
streak, and the controversy around assistant coach Melvin Haralson.
And Coleman stressed that, with the team going on the road for the next
two games, it would be good to get away from the negativity that has
been around the team. He and Lewis also stated the team’s focus is now
on the conference tournament, which they feel is wide open to any team
to win.
But the team has to finish the regular season before it
gets to the tournament, and that starts this week as the team goes for
revenge against UCF in Orlando on Tuesday — their worst game of the
season was unarguably their loss to UCF back in January. Then they
play UAB in Birmingham on Saturday before returning to Hofheinz
Pavilion to take on Memphis on Wednesday February 24.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2010.
