#19 New Mexico 90-#20 Texas Tech 75
Pat Knight said his No. 20 Texas Tech Red Raiders played satisfied and overconfident in the 90-75 thumping handed to them by the UNM men’s basketball team at The Pit on Tuesday.
“What it is — you have a hungry team here at New Mexico,” Knight said. “You got a satisfied team at Texas Tech. That’s the problem with kids. They read on the internet. Everyone’s kissing their ass — being ranked and all of that — and it gets to them. That’s the thing we’re fighting with the internet. I can’t stop them from looking things up on the phone.”
But the Red Raiders couldn’t stop the No. 19 Lobos from dialing in from all over the court, but mostly inside the paint, where UNM amassed 44 of its points. The Lobos shot a season-high 30-of-43 from the free-throw line, the most they’ve attempted since shooting 52 against UTEP in 2008.
Knight, the son of tempestuous basketball coach Bobby Knight, was chafed by his team’s dreary play. He was a touch milder at the podium than the senior Knight, who once remarked that “fuck” was his favorite, and the most useful, word in the English language.
“You score 70-some points — that’s enough to win,” Pat Knight said Tuesday. “Nobody ask me questions about offense. Offense has nothing to do with it. You got to guard; you got to defend. I could give a flying shit about the offense right now. … Our problem is we don’t guard (expletive) anybody right now.”
Though the scoreboard told a much different tale, these two teams were supposedly evenly matched, separated by less than six degrees.
Even both the Lobos’ Steve Alford and Texas Tech’s Pat Knight are all-too familiar. Alford played under the heralded Bobby Knight at Indiana. And Pat Knight — the name says it all.
And then the two teams came in with nearly identical records. The Lobos, who entered Tuesday’s contest 12-1 overall, had just suffered their first defeat at the hands of Oral Roberts, 75-66. Tech boasted a 10-1 record before Tuesday’s game, with its only loss to Wichita State, 85-83.
For a second, these teams were separated by six points with 17:56 to go in the second half. But at the end, they hardly looked so analogous.
Still, UNM had to overcome obstacles of its own in the process. There was a lack of production out of go-to forward Roman Martinez. Martinez, 4-of-21 from the field in his last two games and, even worse, just 3-of-16 from 3-point land, was out of synch in the first half.
Tech held Martinez scoreless in the first half, and it wasn’t until the 18-minute mark that Martinez notched his first point off a free throw.
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Two free throws by Darington Hobson — who set the pace for the Lobos with 23 points, 12 rebounds and four assists — along with a put back by Martinez off a missed freebie by A.J. Hardeman ignited an 11-2 surge which gave the Lobos a sizeable cushion, 51-38, with 15:13 to go in the game.
“We knew we gave the game away at Oral Roberts,” Hobson said. “We just wanted to come out and respond. This is a big-time win, because they’re going to be ranked all year, and they’re going to do good in their conference. They’ll most likely go to the tournament.”
Though it wasn’t his best performance to date, Martinez finished with 10 points and 11 rebounds. His most spectacular play of the night came when he used his whole body to knock the ball away from a Tech player sprinting upcourt on a fastbreak.
Martinez lunged and stripped him of the ball as it skirted out of bounds.
“Ro doesn’t have to score to make us productive,” Alford said. “There are a lot of players that play this game that they have to score or they have to rebound. They have to do one trait all the time for you to win. Ro, if he’s not scoring, he gets to the free-throw line. … He’s just Ro. They got a break-away layup, he dives from what seems like the half-court line.”
Hardeman finished with 10 points, and the Lobos got an off-the-bench boost from Curtis Dennis, who chipped in 14 points in 14 minutes of play. Will Brown was the only other Lobo in double figures with 11 points.
