BSU fizzles, coach sizzles at ISU
The Boise State men's basketball team lost at Idaho State on Thursday night, but not before coach Greg Graham nearly lost it.
Long before his team took an 88-79 defeat in front of 2,388 fans at Reed Gym, Graham pulled a rarity by calling back-to-back timeouts for the sole purpose of ripping into his underperforming team.
The Broncos (2-2) were down 55-42 with 13 minutes, 14 seconds left in the second half when Graham decided he'd seen enough.
He called a timeout and took his team to the middle of the floor and proceeded to yell and point fingers at just about every Bronco standing around him in the huddle.
When the buzzer sounded to signal the end of the 60-second timeout, Graham called another 30-second TO and finished his tirade.
"He was telling us everything that we already knew," said BSU junior Coby Karl, who scored a game-high 21 points and had a career-high 10 rebounds. "We weren't tough enough. They were getting all the loose balls, they were getting all the offensive boards. They were taking us out of everything we wanted to do, and we weren't playing hard."
It's the first time Graham has called back-to-back timeouts for that reason.
The Broncos got the message. They started playing with more passion and aggression, attacking the Bengals at both ends of the floor. Back-to-back 3-point shots by Karl and Tyler Tiedeman pulled BSU within 67-64 with 5:48 left.
"It worked temporarily," Graham said, "but as a team, they outplayed us tonight."
The problem ? and the Broncos know it ? is that it shouldn't take an animated in-your-face talk from the coach to get players to do what they're supposed to do.
"We shouldn't need that," BSU sophomore Matt Bauscher said. "We just need to come together as a team."
The Broncos had several chances to tie or take the lead, but couldn't get it done.
Bauscher, who finished with 16 points, seven rebounds and three steals, missed a layup that could have tied the score.
Forward Seth Robinson grabbed the rim on a play where Karl was fouled. The ball was about to fall in for a potential three-point play, but Robinson knocked the ball out of the cylinder.
Despite those hiccups, BSU was within 72-71 with 3:23 left when Bengals guard Tim Henry made a layup to push the lead back to 74-71.
That's when ISU made the decisive run brought on by a highlight-reel play.
ISU senior Slim Millien, who entered the game averaging a double-double, had just one point and two rebounds to that point. But he blocked a shot at one end, then finished off the play with an acrobatic one-armed slam dunk that turned a quiet, nervous crowd into a rabid one.
The Broncos turned it over on the ensuing possession, and Henry followed a missed shot with a layup as he was falling down and was fouled.
The three-point play made it 79-71 and sealed BSU's fate.
"That was a huge play for them," Karl said. "That dunk was worth five points because it got the crowd on its feet. We would have been fine if we didn't fall into the emotion."
BSU was plagued by foul trouble. Tiedeman and Robinson fouled out, while Tez Banks and Kareem Lloyd had four fouls, forcing Graham to sometimes play with five guards on the floor.
The smaller lineup resulted in ISU (3-1) scoring 18 second-chance points.
David Schroeder (19 points and 12 rebounds) led four ISU players in double figures. Henry (17), Logan Kinghorn (16) and Kasey Winters (13) also hit twin digits for coach Doug Oliver's team, which won despite making only 24-of-40 foul shots. BSU was just 8-of-15 at the line.
Graham said the Broncos need to regroup in a hurry. BSU plays at Weber State on Saturday, and the Wildcats already own a five-point win over the Broncos this season.
"We have to play as a unit," he said. "We went through this last year. I think our chemistry is fine, but we're not doing team things. We need to get better as a group to play to our potential.
"We've got good kids and they play hard. They just try to shoulder too much of the responsibility on themselves and get it done by themselves. It's not an 'I need to step up' thing. It's a 'We need to step up,' and we've got to do it as a group."
NOTE: Lloyd saw his first action of the season. He had been out with a broken toe sustained in late October. He finished with four points and four rebounds in 15 minutes of action.
