UTC Mocs logoThe University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team fought hard in battling back from a 14-point halftime deficit Saturday at Western Carolina, eventually tying the game with under two minutes to go.
Yet with one shot by James Sinclair, the Mocs walked away with a bitter taste in their collective mouth.
Sinclair crossed over at the top of the key, spun, did a little shake-and-bake and hit a fadeaway jumper for the last of his game-high 21 points with 35 seconds remaining, and the Catamounts hung on to defeat the Mocs 73-70 in front of 3,063 fans at the Ramsey Center in Cullowhee, N.C.
That ended a two-game win streak for UTC (16-9, 9-3), which fell into a second-place tie with Mercer in the Southern Conference. The Bears beat the Mocs in Macon, Ga., nine days earlier.
The Mocs end a three-game road sequence Thursday when they take on first-place Wofford (20-5, 11-1) in Spartanburg, S.C. They’ll be back home Saturday to take on the conference’s hottest team, Samford, which has won five straight games after an 0-8 start in conference play.
Justin Tuoyo scored 14 of his 17 points in the second half for the Mocs, adding eight rebounds, four assists and two blocks. He now has 80 blocks for the season, which is the third-best total in school history, behind Z. Mason’s 92 blocks last season and Neil Ashby’s 89 blocks in 2001-02.
Duke Ethridge had his best game in a UTC uniform, finishing with 13 points, six rebounds, two blocks and a pair of steals. Greg Pryor added 11 points and two steals, while Casey Jones had 10 points and seven rebounds.
The Mocs were 8-of-27 (30 percent) from the field in the first half and trailed 39-25 at the break.
“I thought we played well in the second half,” UTC coach Will Wade said on the postgame radio broadcast. “We wanted to get the ball in the paint. I felt like we settled for too many jump shots in the first half, and that’s a tough way to live, especially when you are not making a lot of them.”
As a result, there was a concerted effort to get the ball to Tuoyo to start the second half, and he responded by scoring 12 of the team’s first 14 points after halftime. The Mocs kept chipping away at the deficit, trimming it to 56-52 on a 3-pointer by Ethridge and 57-56 after four consecutive points by Pryor.
The Catamounts (12-13, 7-6) stretched their lead back out to seven, but the Mocs answered again, tying the game at 70 on two free throws by Pryor with 1:53 remaining. He followed that with a steal of Rhett Harrelson but missed a 3-pointer, which set up Sinclair’s shot.
The Mocs called time out with 7.6 seconds to play to set up a final shot, but Eric Robertson’s attempt was short, and Kenneth Hall was fouled a couple seconds later and split a pair at the line for the final margin.
Mike Brown scored 16 points for the Catamounts while matching Sinclair for rebounding honors with nine. Torrion Brummitt added 14 points before fouling out. Western Carolina was coming off a four-point loss to Samford on Thursday in which it held a 21-point lead with under 11 minutes to play.
“I couldn’t be more proud of our guys,” WCU coach Larry Hunter said on the Catamount Sports Network. “We played our guts out and beat a really good team — a team with an awful lot of confidence that had won a potload of close games this year. They fought back in the second half, but we made plays when we had to, made some stops, and several guys came up big.
“It was a great, great team win in a great atmosphere, and a win we needed. Our team told me a lot about themselves today. I’ve learned a lot the last couple of days about this team, and hopefully we can continue to build off of this one.”