Eleventh-seeded Ohio lost 82-74 to sixth-seeded Western Michigan in the opening round of the Mid-American Conference Tournament on Monday.
KALAMAZOO, Michigan — It’s tough to say a team could have salvaged a season when it lost eight of its last nine games and was ousted in the first round of its conference tournament.
For 11th-seeded Ohio, its 82-74 loss to sixth-seeded Western Michigan in the opening round of the Mid-American Conference Tournament on Monday might have been the closest thing.
It wasn’t the margin of defeat or the points scored that sent this team off on a better note, but rather the way the Bobcats faced their toughest battles and the way they played with their highest intensity of the season. Ohio didn’t lie down and tap out after its worst season since 2003-04.
Still, that didn’t make the ending better for first-year coach Saul Phillips and his players. Ohio’s season is now over the earliest since that 2003-04 season.
“It’s tough to have your season end. It just is,” Phillips said. “We certainly played better basketball in our last two games. We were flat-lined there for a good chunk of time.”
After a 27-point loss to Buffalo just a week ago, it looked like the Bobcats were still struggling to take any steps forward because they kept committing the same problems throughout the seven-game skid. But during the last two games — Monday’s loss and last Friday’s 30-point victory on senior night — Phillips felt the team played at a different level, as a group of leaders and as a basketball team.
And with the way the Bobcats started Monday’s game, leading by 14 points with 12:27 left in the first half, the loss was even harder tougher to swallow.
The Bobcats’ lone fourth-year senior, guard Stevie Taylor, started the game showing that he didn’t want Monday to be his last collegiate game. He scored nine of the Bobcats’ first 15 points and led all scorers at halftime with 19 points overall. He finished with a career-high 25 points to go along with five assists.
“At this point of the year we don’t have anything to lose but go out there and play hard, and that’s what we did,” said senior forward Maurice Ndour, who finished his last game as a Bobcat with a team-high 28 points and 11 assists. “Sometimes you kind of get like that, when you start scoring you kind of get greedy and try to do it by yourself. ... We didn’t share the basketball and they capitalized on that.”
The Broncos eventually started clicking, which made it tough for the Bobcats on the defensive end. Ohio was outscored 51-41 during the second half, while the Broncos shot better than 50 percent from the field and 60 percent from 3-point range.
That was largely because of David Brown, a redshirt senior guard for the Broncos, who led the game with a season-high 34 points — 21 of which came in the second half.
When the two teams faced off in University Arena three weeks ago, the Bobcats held Brown to 12 points and one 3-pointer. Monday, however, he made eight of 14 3-pointers.
“One thing that makes this part of the year so special is watching players who just don’t want to be done and leave everything out there,” Phillips said. “We did a decent job on him the first time we played him this year, but this time he kind of got off on us. We threw every different person we could at him.”
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