Red Hot Sun Devils Put Heat on Red Flash Men’s Basketball Team
TEMPE, Arizona (Dec. 29, 2007) – Arizona State opened an early lead and made an amazing 31 of its 43 field goal attempts to hand the Saint Francis men’s basketball team a 95-56 defeat in both teams’ non-conference finales on Saturday afternoon before 6,742 fans at Wells Fargo Arena.
The Sun Devils made five of their first seven 3-point attempts to take a 23-4 lead just 6:35 into the game. Meanwhile, the Red Flash missed on 11 of their first 14 field goals, including 6-of-7 from long range.
SFU redshirt junior Bassirou Dieng (Dakar, Senegal / Riverdale Baptist) tallied a career high 17 points and pulled down five rebounds in just 23 minutes before fouling out with 10:04 remaining in the game. Junior Grant Surprenant (Palatine, Ill. / Palatine) made 5-of-9 three-point attempts for 15 points to go with 2 assists and a career high 2 blocks off the bench. Surprenant is the Northeast Conference’s leader in 3-point field goal percentage at 60.0 percent.
James Harden scored 17 of his game-high 21 points in the first half to pace the Sun Devils. He was 6-of-7 from the field and added five assists, four rebounds and four steals. Jeff Pendergraph and Ty Abbott had 19 points each, Duke transfer Eric Boateng tallied 12 off the bench, and Derek Glasser had 11 points.
Arizona State (10-2) came out on fire to build an insurmountable lead. Four players did all of the scoring in the first half for the Sun Devils. Pendergraph made all five of his field goal attempts for 18 points, Harden had 17, Abbott contributed 12 and Glasser had four points as ASU took a 51-27 lead into the break.
While they shot 65.2 percent in the first half, the Sun Devils made 16-of-20 field goal attempts in the final 20 minutes. They hit all three of their 3-point attempts in the second half and set a single-game school record by making 73.3 percent of their long range shots (11-of-15).
Arizona State kept Saint Francis’ top two scorers to single digits as junior Cale Nelson (Newville, Pa. / Big Spring) had two points and sophomore Devin Sweetney (Washington, D.C. / Riverdale Baptist) had four points. Nelson tied a season high with 7 assists, while Sweetney had five rebounds and two assists. Junior Chris Berry (Seagoville, Texas / Seagoville) had 13 points, three rebounds, two assists and one steal.
The Red Flash will now turn their attention to the Northeast Conference schedule. They will play host to Quinnipiac at 7 p.m. on Thursday at DeGol Arena. The Bobcats and Red Flash are both 1-0 in conference play.
Postgame Quotes:
Head coach Bobby Jones
“I thought they were a little bit more physical than we anticipated coming in. This is a good ball club. (Arizona State second year head coach) Herb Sendek has done an outstanding job in such a short period of time. He’s getting some really good players. That’s a young basketball club we played against. They only have one junior, so certainly you expect to hear great things from Arizona State in the years to come. But I thought all in all physically we were just overmatched most of the day. I thought we battled at times. The first half, boy they came out sizzling hot. We knew coming into the game that they had four or five guys that are capable shooters at any time on the floor. But they started the game hitting four 3-pointers right off the bat and dug a little bit of a hole for us early. But we kept fighting. I thought our guys fought in spite of being physically outmatched today. We can’t get discouraged. This team is certainly more physical than Duquesne who we played last Friday, and they were able to get some easy buckets early to go down for them.”
“What we were looking for in this game were two things – effort and just playing through adversity. If things didn’t go exactly the way we wanted them to go early, we wanted to continue to play and get ready to go into league play next week. This is our last non-conference game. We certainly didn’t want to end with a deficit like this on the road. But nevertheless we got to keep it in perspective and we’ve got to go back now and get ready for Quinnipiac and Monmouth.”
“This is a good basketball team we lost to. I’m proud of the way the guys continue to play and play hard. We were able to get guys into the game this afternoon here that haven’t got a lot of minutes early as we approach conference play. There’s not much that you can take out of a game like this other than we were able to get guys minutes who have been sitting this early part of the season, and hopefully that will give them a little bit of confidence as we approach league play. Now it starts. This is a new season. We have a 17 game season. We are 1-0 in conference play. It’s certainly not going to be easy Thursday night at home against Quinnipiac, and then of course on Saturday we have Monmouth coming in. We’ve got to find a way in the next two or three days to play better at home. That’s my challenge right now is to sit down and see what we can do as a staff to get our team a little better prepared to play better at home. We have played good basketball on the road despite what happened here today. But we’ve got to take that type of effort home as we approach league play.”
“We’ll enjoy this afternoon and enjoy some nice weather here and get the guys a chance to watch a good tough football game tonight with the Patriots and Giants. It’s been a nice trip for the guys. This is something they can talk about in the years to come. All in all, we didn’t play our best basketball, but we do understand that we ran up against a team that’s pretty good out here this afternoon in Arizona State. We’ll regroup. Take tomorrow off and travel back. We’ll get in there on Monday. We’re going double sessions on Monday to get back and get a lot of shots up. We’ve been away from DeGol Arena for quite some time, so we’ve got to get back and get some shots up. We need three really good days of practice as we prepare for Quinnipiac on Thursday night.”