The Hawks took down the Red Raiders on Thursday night to advance to the championship game.
With Thursday’s 70-66 win over the Syracuse Orange, the Texas Longhorns advanced to Friday’s championship game in the Legends Classic at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, earning a matchup with the Saint Joseph’s Hawks, who survived a buzzer beater by the Texas Tech Red Raiders in a 78-77 win.
Tip is at approximately 8:30 p.m. Central on ESPNU following the third-place game between the Orange and the Red Raiders.
It was an up-and-down performance for head coach Rodney Terry’s team on Thursday — the Horns raced out to a 9-0 less than two and a half minutes into the game and extended the margin to as many as 16 points in the second half.
Syracuse battled back with a 14-2 run thanks to the playmaker of center Eddie Lampkin as the Orange frontcourt bullied the Longhorns around the basket. Meanwhile, Texas went cold offensively, going 1-of-10 shooting during that stretch before freshman guard Tre Johnson lost his composure and tried to force himself on the game.
Johnson did made six key free throws down the stretch, but also went 4-of-18 shooting, including 1-of-7 shooting from three, and turned the ball over five times, matching his total of five turnovers over the first four games.
A double-double by senior forward Arthur Kaluma helped save Texas as the Creighton and Kansas State transfer was 6-of-11 shooting, made all four of his free throws, and added four assists.
Poor three-point shooting and free-throw shooting also doomed the Orange and bailed out the Longhorns — Syracuse hit just 5-of-21 shots from distance and went 9-of-18 shooting from the line, ugly numbers that ultimately doomed the comeback attempt.
Against Saint Joseph’s, Texas looks for its first regular-season, neutral-site MTE victory since winning the Maui Invitational in 2020 that was held in Asheville due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Hawks squeezed past the Red Raiders behind 26 points from guard Erik Reynolds, who made 6-of-11 three-point attempts. Fellow guard Xzayvier Brown added 20 points in an inefficient performance from the field buoyed by hitting all 13 of his free-throw attempts. Combined, the two Saint Joseph’s guards scored nearly 60 percent of the points for the Hawks.
Texas Tech received a big performance from New Mexico transfer forward JT Toppin, who chose the Red Raiders over the Longhorns in a high-profile decision over the offseason — Toppin scored 22 points and added 18 rebounds, two assists, two steals, and two blocks, but also turned the ball over five times and was whistled for four fouls.
Saint Joseph’s controlled the first half, taking a 10-point lead into the break before Texas Tech rallied, much as Syracuse did, using an 8-0 run early in the second half to turn it into a close contest before Justice Ajogbar hit a key free throw for the Hawks with 13 seconds remaining to break a tie before Texas Tech guard Darrion Williams missed a shot at the buzzer.
Currently ranked as the No. 83 team in BartTorvik.com’s adjusted efficiency metric, the Hawks were picked to finish third in the 15-team Atlantic 10 this season under sixth-year head coach Billy Lange, who led Saint Joseph’s to an NIT appearance last year.
The early statistical profile for Saint Joseph’s reveals a solid defensive team that doesn’t do anything particularly well other than avoid sending opponents to the free-throw line, but it’s also not a team with any obvious weaknesses.
Texas enters the game with a 76-percent win probability with a projected score of 77-70.