The UC San Diego men’s basketball team (2–1, 0–0 Big West) defeated Pepperdine (1–1, 0–0 WCC) by a final score of 94–76 on Saturday night. Senior forward Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones and senior guard Tyler McGhie led the way for the Tritons, scoring 25 and 20 points, respectively.
The Tritons are living up to the lofty expectations of being ranked No. 3 in the Big West’s preseason poll. With UCSD now being tournament-eligible, there is an air of excitement surrounding this team that could be seen in the sold-out LionTree Arena.
Saturday’s game was part of UCSD’s homecoming weekend. The giveaway of the night was a white homecoming T-shirt for the first 1,500 fans to arrive, creating an intimidating atmosphere for the Waves.
UCSD Head Coach Eric Olen complimented the atmosphere and how it helped the team’s performance. “It’s huge. Especially when things don’t go well, [the crowd] helps you respond. … as we made plays, you could feel the crowd getting back into it and re-energizing the team,” he said in a postgame interview with The UCSD Guardian.
The game started slowly as both teams struggled to find the bottom of the basket. Pepperdine won the opening tip, but junior guard Chris Howell drew a charge to end the Waves’ first possession. On the ensuing Triton possession, UCSD snared two of their own misses, but junior forward Nordin Kapic missed the resulting three from the top of the key. The crowd waited two and a half minutes after the opening tip before they had anything to cheer about; senior guard Hayden Gray poked the ball away from a Pepperdine forward and knocked down a fast-break 3-pointer to open the scoring.
The two teams traded leads in the early going, but UCSD developed a solid 8-point lead after McGhie made a 3-pointer a tad over five minutes into the game, making it 12–4 for the Tritons.
UCSD maintained this lead for most of the first half, going blow for blow with Pepperdine. However, they turned on the jets and put some distance between themselves and the Waves in the final minutes of the half. UCSD outscored Pepperdine 11–3 during this stretch to take a commanding 15-point lead going into halftime. McGhie put the exclamation mark on this dominant run with a buzzer-beater 3-pointer from the top of the key.
The start of the second half was all Pepperdine. The Waves’ ability to make contested shots and cold shooting from the Tritons fueled Pepperdine to a 12–4 run in the first two minutes of the second frame. After an emphatic two-handed slam by a Pepperdine forward and a turnover by Gray leading to 3 points on the other end, the Triton advantage dwindled to 7 points. Coach Olen called a timeout, and the once raucous home crowd grew silent.
The crowd was not silent for long, however, as a Tait-Jones chase-down block on one end and a Kapic 3-pointer on the other reinvigorated the arena. The rest of the Tritons followed suit, as they snapped out of their shooting slump and got hot from the field.
The Tritons ran away with the game and never gave it back. By the time Tait-Jones blew by his defender with a half-spin move on the right baseline and made the layup to give UCSD a 24 point lead, he had put the game to bed. Perhaps this is what inspired his rock-the-baby celebration as he walked to the bench after Pepperdine called a timeout.
Winning the turnover battle was key to the Tritons’ victory. Although Pepperdine outshot UCSD, they had 19 turnovers to UCSD’s nine. The Tritons scored 34 points from turnovers while Pepperdine scored just 10. Turnovers piled up for Pepperdine, and this gave the Tritons open looks that they capitalized on to cruise to a blowout win. Gray was key to this turnover discrepancy, as he followed up his four-steal performance at SDSU with five more against Pepperdine. Howell was also instrumental, recording three steals on the night.
The Tritons had to overcome Pepperdine’s size advantage, as the Waves tried to get 6-foot-10-inch forward Boubacar Coulibaly and 6-foot-9-inch forward Dovydas Butka the ball in the paint as much as possible. UCSD disrupted the flow of Pepperdine’s offense by denying passing lanes to the Waves’ tall players in the post. Coach Olen said, “We aren’t the biggest team, but we have a lot of interchangeable parts.” He added that his team’s switchability and matchup zone scheme allows them to mitigate potential mismatches by ensuring that opponents get the ball in areas where UCSD can bring defensive help. He said, “Our guys did a decent job of that tonight.”
This was UCSD’s first-ever victory over Pepperdine. They lost their only other encounter with the Waves 68–62 in Malibu last year. The Tritons maintained their form in a 64–54 win over Sacramento State on Tuesday, and they will look to continue their winning streak against Seattle University on Saturday.
