After their best shooting performance in years in a 91-76 win against Temple and a high-scoring 87-77 win against Bradley, the Tritons saved their best for last.
On Wednesday, Nov. 26, UC San Diego men’s basketball (7-0, 0-0 Big West) dominated Towson (5-3, 0-0 CAA) 87-73 en route to winning the Terry’s Chocolate ESPN Events Invitational. Redshirt junior forward Leo Beath, who averaged 23.7 points per game on 61.9% shooting across the three matches, was named tournament MVP.
“We came here for a championship, and we got a championship,” Beath said in a postgame interview with The UCSD Guardian. “That’s all I could ask for.”
Across three days, the Tritons played some of their finest offensive basketball in years, scoring 85 or more points in each game of the tournament. They had an effective field-goal percentage of 68.6% — their best three-game stretch since transitioning to Division I.
“We are not a finished product,” head coach Clint Allard said to The Guardian. “We got to be better a week from now, a month from now, and at the end of the season. We still have our best basketball ahead of us, but we should be very confident that we got a good team in the locker room.”
UCSD wasted no time getting on the board during Wednesday’s championship game, scoring the game’s first 9 points from beyond the arc. Towson tried furiously to stop UCSD on the perimeter, but to no avail. The Tritons shot 11 for 18 from deep in the first half, ballooning their lead to 26 late in the half. They finished the game shooting 64% from beyond the arc — their best-ever performance from deep against a Division-I opponent. Nine different Tritons scored a triple, tying an NCAA Division-I record.
“Making shots opens everything else up for us,” Allard said. “We had ball and player movement. Everybody shares the ball, and we have threats at every position; we’re hard to guard.”
The 3-point barrage came against a Tigers team that limited six of their seven previous opponents to under 30% from beyond the arc. The Tritons’ 16 made 3-point field goals were the most Towson has allowed in a game since 2019.
“We’ve seen teams like this,” Beath said. “Just play our normal offense, play with pace, play fast, and we got too many shooters for them.”
Junior guard Aidan Burke had the hot hand early, igniting for 14 points in the first half — draining four 3-pointers in 13 minutes. However, the Tigers limited him in the second half, scoring no points on a singular field-goal attempt.
“When you make some shots in the first half, they’re gonna pay even more and more attention to you,” Allard said.
Towson recovered in the second half, and an early 11-2 run shrank the lead down to single digits. However, after three days of grueling basketball, the Tigers didn’t have enough left in the tank, and the Tritons closed out the game with a 87-73 victory.
This result marks the second straight year that the Tritons have won a multiteam event. Last season, the Tritons defeated Toledo 80-45 to win the Boardwalk Battle — at the time, the win was their largest in program history. Although they couldn’t reach those heights against Towson, they faced little difficulty in securing the title. In the process, UCSD has risen to No. 95 in the KenPom rankings, up 35 spots from when the tournament began.
UCSD remains undefeated after seven games. The Tritons now prepare to face a talented Nevada team in Reno on Tuesday, Dec. 2.
