UPDATED
Marquette extended its Big East win streak to three games with a convincing 73-64 win over the hapless St. John's Red Storm in Madison Square Garden tonight. With the win MU improves to 19-6 on the season and 9-5 in the Big East.
Jerel McNeal led the charge with 20 points and keyed a defense that forced 23 Red Storm turnovers including 16 in the first half. Dominic James added 19 points and turned in a terrific floor game as well (including 9-9 from the charity stripe). Trevor Mbakwe also turned in a noteworthy performance, grabbing seven rebounds and scoring five points while demonstrating an impressive nose for the ball on the offensive glass.
MU led by as many as 23 points in the second half before the Johnnies launched a spirited 14-2 run to cut the lead to 61-50 with 6:31 remaining. From that point the game was an ugly grinder though MU settled down enough to earn its third Big East conference road win of the year.
Next up for Marquette is a home game against the Rutgers Scarlet Knights on Saturday afternoon.
AP Recap / Box / Play by Play
Media Recaps
Looked great - Mbakwe's ability to get back and Ooze's improvement were the missing pieces - I think we are ready. If we win the final 4 (23-Rut, 25-at Vil, 1-Gtown, 8-at Syr) we have a good chance at the 4-seed and a buy.
ReplyDeleteSimplist scenario is Gtown loses to Lville in finale after losing to us - would give us 4th place with head-to-head tiebreaker against Gtown.
Gets more confusing if we end up tied with ND for 4th with them losing 2 games from Pit, Syr & Lville. Under confusing BE tiebreaker, we would then need Pit, Gtown or both to also finish with 5 losses to win the 3-way tiebreaker OR if it was just ND and us tied we would need Gtown to finish higher than UConn - won't try to explain but root for Pit against ND tomorrow for starters.
BamaMarquetteFan
Nice win, and McNeil played like a man, but we need Matthews to step up. 4 shots? He needs to take 12, make 6 and draw 3 fouls. We're not going anywhere in the NCAA with him as a spectator. He has the size/speed ratio to do serious damage, but its plain painful to watch his "offense" these days.
ReplyDeleteI actually don't have any issue with Matthews' game last night. Yeah, he only had four FGA, but part of that was because he got to the line and went 5-5.
ReplyDeleteWe'll show this later tonight or tomorrow, but Matthews had the highest offensive rating on the team, and a net positive contribution.
I know that Rosiak is saying Matthews hasn't been in double figures in a while, but he's also had net positive contributions in six of his last seven games. As long as he's net positive, that's good for me.