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January 18, 2008 > Sports > No. 2 Memphis rips Owls

No. 2 Memphis rips Owls

Losing streak now at six games after 77-50 home loss

By Kushagra Shrinath | Thresher staff

If there are such things as moral victories, the men’s basketball team may have earned one Wednesday against the University of Memphis. However, moral victories only come about in losses, as was the case for Rice, which was overpowered in nearly every facet of competition in a 77-50 loss to the second-ranked Tigers at Reliant Arena.

The Owls (3-13, 0-3 Conference USA) will now travel to New Orleans, La., to face Tulane University tomorrow at 5 p.m. The Green Wave (11-6, 1-2 C-USA) notched its first win in conference play last Wednesday, defeating the University of Tulsa 67-65 in overtime.

Should Rice hope to come away with its first conference win tomorrow, the Owls will need to clamp down on Tulane’s David Gomez, who is tenth in C-USA with 13.6 points per game. But a more pressing issue for the Owls will be on the other side of the ball — Rice is dead last in C-USA with a minus-14.8 scoring margin, more than ten points worse than second-worst Southern Methodist University.

The start of last Wednesday’s game made this disparity abundantly clear. Not only did Rice turn the ball over three times in the first two minutes, but senior forward Paulius Packevicius — C-USA’s leader with 6.94 defensive rebounds per game — received his second personal foul at the 17:53 mark to force him to the bench for much of the first half.

Memphis’ defense hounded Rice’s offense for much of the game — especially in the first half, during which the Owls committed 19 turnovers — the majority of which were forced by the heavy full-court press employed by Memphis head coach John Calipari.

Trailing 23-9 with just over nine minutes remaining in the first half, the Owls finally found their footing and went on a solid 12-5 run to cut the Tigers’ lead to seven. However, missed layups and more turnovers by Rice allowed Memphis to respond with a 12-2 run of their own and reestablish the lead at 40-23 heading into halftime.

“We just weren’t able to execute the last couple of minutes in the first half,” Packevicius said. “We didn’t show as much intensity as we had earlier.”

The second half was largely uneventful as Memphis opened its lead to as much as 29 points before winning by a comfortable margin. But despite getting outscored 37-27 in the second half, Rice grabbed only one fewer rebound than the Tigers.

And though the Tigers dominated, Calipari said he was impressed by Rice’s solid play and praised Rice head coach Willis Wilson’s (Will Rice ‘82) game management, considering the Owls had lost starting junior guard Rodney Foster to a knee injury and had two football players — sophomore forward Chance Talbert and freshman guard Pierre Beasley — suit up.

Calipari also showed concern over Rice being able to show more effort throughout the game than Memphis.

“Anyone who saw the game will tell you that they out-hustled us,” Calipari said. “The difference in score is mostly due to our press and them turning the ball over, but if we had just guarded them [instead of pressed], the score would have been much closer.”

Wilson said that the level of athleticism and size that Memphis possesses is almost impossible to simulate in practice, and inevitably results in poor results in games.

“In practice we would have a 6’2” guy pressuring the point guard, but today it was a 6’7” guy instead,” Wilson said. “What we’ve practiced against is rarely what we’ve seen in games this year, and that’s been a part of our struggles.”

End of article

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