Delroy James didn't have a great shooting day, but he looked like the best player on the floor, even better than future NBA pick James Anderson of Oklahoma State.
UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Rhode Island claims it doesn’t care about rankings, the RPI or public perception. Fair enough. But the players are sure entertaining while shrugging off compliments.
“I don’t even know what top 25 is,” Delroy James said. “I think we play Akron on Tuesday, right?”
“In the end, that doesn’t mean nothing — if you was top 25 in January. We have to be in the NCAA,” Stevie Mejia said.
And its head coach will take an ugly win any day of the week. Especially against a school like Oklahoma State, which has made a habit of winning ugly in the past.
“Winning ugly is winning, sometimes,” head coach Jim Baron said. “That’s why we kept the pressure up too, because we wanted to wear them down. I thought our bench played one of the best games they’ve played.”
This is a group that’s had some terrific starts to its recent season, but seen an A10 slate it couldn’t overcome.
A difference for the Rams in 2010 could be the signature win over Oklahoma State it got Saturday afternoon at the Mohegan Sun Arena. I brought out up how legitimate the A10 was recently, and now there’s another notch on the bedpost.
The Rams had 17 second-chance points in the first half, and that seemed to be the difference in the game. Don’t believe me? Believe the Rhode Island and Oklahoma State coaches and players, who all agreed, despite OSU coming back to take a three-point lead in the second half, that the Cowboys allowed URI to dictate how this game would play out.
“I’m not happy about anything right now,” Cowboys head coach Travis Ford said after a reporter implored if he could see a positive in his team’s ability to come back from a 12-point deficit.
“We lost the game in the first half,” Ford said. “Plain and simple. That’s about as poor as my team has played in a long time. It was a long trip here, I guess. I don’t know why … we weren’t ourselves whatsoever in the first half. I was disappointed in our effort and disappointed in our rebounding. We got beat to a lot of 50-50 balls.”
Another thing seems clear: Baron trusts his bench; Ford does not. The Rams had 10 players see seven minutes or more of action, and the one who only saw three — Nikola Malesevic — hit the biggest shot of the game.
Malesevic, who hadn’t played in three games, was subbed into the contest after the Rams gave back their big lead and trailed 44-41 with 8:36 remaining. So what does the kid do? Immediately drains a 3 and ties the score. Oklahoma State wouldn’t lead again after it lost its 46-44 advantage.
“It was like ‘Hoosiers,’” Baron said of Malesevic’s shot. “He just [took] that shot like we he was supposed to do it. And I tell you what, I looked at my assistants — I think they thought I was a little bit out of touch when I did it, becasue I ran to him and I grabbed him, and I said, ‘Nik, go in there.’ And he was like, What are you doing? … A play like that makes you the smartest coach in the world.”
Though Keiton Page responded the right way, how could he have expected Malesevic to come in and provide a quick spark?
“Any team we play, we’re going to have their whole squad on our scouting report,” Page said. “We knew he was a shooter. He came in and hit a big one on us.”
Rhode Island’s guys admitted to being stunned.
“He surprised me,” Stevie Mejia said, smiling, in the postgame presser.
Rhode Island’s bench. Who knew it would be this deep? It was deep enough that Baron didn’t have one starter in the game with seven minutes to go. And even when Delroy James and his teammates were put on the pine, he said the team never got nervous when its Big-Six opponent was making its run.
“You can’t get down on yourself,” Delroy James said. “It’s a 40-minute game. The game is a game of runs and spurts. … It’s how you come back from it. If we put our head down, we already would have lost the game.”
A lot of coaches can talk about the quality of depth on a bench. At least Rhode Island backed it up in a game it had to.
“Our subs know that they can come in the game at any point and we’re relying on them,” Baron said.
And Ford saw only one player, Roger Franklin, get double-digit minutes off the pine. That was primarily due to foul trouble, by the way. Ford looked about as beaten as could be after this one. He was on the officials’ case all game (that’s not something new, but still).
“When James Anderson plays the way he does, and Marshall Moses, even though he got 15 rebounds, which was good, but we didn’t get much out of him in the post, I was surprised we were even that close.”
As for James Anderson, who looked downright anonymous, he criticized himself for getting fazed.
“No excuses. We didn’t show up to play today,” he said. “I got kind of frustrated at times and let it affect my game. … No question, this is a learning experience for us. I think URI could play in the Big 12. They’re a Big 12-type team and that’s what we needed right before going into conference [play].”
Tidbits
Ticket sales did very well for this game. A URI sourced told me the school is actively trying to get a high-profile game played here each year to attract the eastern-Connecticut market. Fans really came out in tough weather to support URI, and this seems like a win-win for Mohegan Sun and the school.
Jim Baron threw a tiny grenade at the BCS-school menality, which was weird. Someone told him about Anderson’s quote that URI is a Big-12 school, in terms of quality, and he said:
“We like to graduate student-athletes. That’s what we do. But the Big 12′s a great conference and that’s a great compliment.”
Below, it’s the exclusive video of the post-game press conferences (ooohh!!) from an elated Jim Baron, a dejected, frustrated Travis Ford and a relaxed, confident Delroy James and Stevie Mejia.
