King, Racers overpower Colonels, 99-79
MBB: The senior forward had 24 points, ten rebounds and five blocks in the win
Murray State beat Nicholls, 99-79, Saturday night at the CFSB Center. Here’s what you need to know:
With the win, the Racers improve to 3-1 on the season
Fred King scored a career-high 24 points, and was a perfect 8-for-8 from the field
Javon Jackson (23 points), Layne Taylor (14 points) and Roman Domon (11 points) each scored in double-figures for the Racers
You can see the complete box score here
Murray State shot a season-best 58.5% from the field and 54.5% (12-for-22) from three-point range
Next up, the Racers will host Little Rock on Tuesday night
King announces his presence with authority against the Colonels
In the first 40 seconds of the game, Murray State senior forward Fred King finished an alley-oop with a thunderous dunk, and then blocked a shot on the other end of the floor. It was the start of arguably the best game of King’s career, as he finished with a career-high 24 points while making all eight of his shots, along with grabbing ten rebounds and blocking five shots.
In the last 20 years, King is now one of five players to have a perfect shooting night with at least eight made field goals, and a 24-10-5 stat line.
“What an effort by Freddie,” Murray State Head Coach Ryan Miller said. “We knew he was going to be an awesome player. I watched him practice for three years going against (former Creighton star Ryan) Kalkbrenner. He just didn’t get the opportunity because he was playing with the best player in the country. He went against him every day for three straight years, so I knew he was going to be an impactful player for us. Obviously, we got him out of the portal and couldn’t be more pleased with his success.”
Racers get off to a much better start
A running theme for this season has been Murray State’s consistent slow starts. After changing the way he ran the team’s final walkthrough this afternoon, to moving Layne Taylor into the starting lineup, Miller watched his Racers jump out early on Nicholls, as Murray State led for all but 63 seconds of the game.
“I think we did a much better job,” sophomore guard Layne Taylor said when asked about how the Racers opened the game. “From the start, playing aggressive. He said before the game, like SMU, we weren’t the aggressor. We were dodging their punches. This game, I think we were a lot more aggressive, and were the aggressor for most of the game, (although) we had stretches where we kind of lacked. I thought we did a much better job being aggressive.
Still too many turnovers for Miller’s liking
The Racers turned the ball over a season-high 20 times, which led to 28 Nicholls points. Throw in Nicholls’ 17 offensive rebounds that turned into 20 second chance points, and Miller’s patience is being tested with his team giving away points.
“These dang turnovers and these dang offensive rebounds by our opponents, we’ve got to nip that in the tail end real quick,” Miller said. “Or else when you play good competition, you’re just not going to survive it. They had 28 points off turnovers and 20 second-chance points. We want it to be the other way around. We’ve got to be better with the basketball, and better decision makers. Give credit to Nicholls. They’re relentless on the glass and they’re very active in the gaps defensively. They were trapping us and made some things difficult, but we’ve got to be much better handling traps. That’s probably on me a little bit. We’ve just got so much to work on and so little time, and teams are throwing a lot of different stuff at us. Whether it’s 1-3-1 trapping, whether it’s full court trapping, we’ve just got to get better at it.”
‘Muddy’ practices prepare Racers for victory
After Tuesday’s loss at SMU, Ryan Miller said his team would be having some ‘muddy’ practices this week in preparation for Nicholls. In short, practices were going to be tough. Layne Taylor said practices were extremely ‘muddy’ this week.
“We had a couple bloody noses,” Taylor said with a smile. “But like I said, being aggressive is not playing on our heels. That’s really what practice was about. We were all aggressive coming into it, and then whenever you’re aggressive against each other in the games, now you get to go take it out on someone else, so it makes it a lot of fun.”
Next up: Another home against Little Rock
The Racers will play the second of back-to-back home games on Tuesday when they host Little Rock at 7:00pm at the CFSB Center.