Aidan Mahaney scored a game-high 17 points and grabbed four rebounds and Hosana Kitenge added 12 points and five boards Saturday night to help UC Santa Barbara pull away from visiting Hawai’i, 77-62, in Big West Conference men’s basketball action.
A crowd of 2,589 in the Thunderdome watched Miro Little and Zion Sensley each add 11 points as the Gauchos improved to 11-7 overall and 4-3 in the Big West. Isaiah Kerr came off the bench to score 13 points and grab three rebounds and Harry Rouhliadeff also added 13 points for UH, which fell to 13-4, 5-2.
UCSB jumped out to a 7-0 lead in the first four minutes and stretched it to 23-8 nine minutes later, then took a 40-21 lead into halftime. The Warriors cut it to 51-44 midway through the second half, but the Gauchos responded with a 17-4 run to expand it to 68-48 with 5:43 remaining, and Hawai’i could not get closer than 13 points the rest of the way.
“We haven’t had too many of those kind of (bad) starts,” Warriors coach Eran Ganot said on Monday. “We missed a couple shots at the rim, and we missed some free throws, missed some open 3’s … and we had lapses. Right now my concern is we had a step back defensively in that game, our worst defensive performance. Sometimes shots will go fall or things like that, but defensive rebounding has been our foundation. And turnovers have creeped up again. But this is a long journey, and there are areas we were exposed in, and we have consistently shown we’ll bounce back and attack those.”
More details to come.