Tommie men’s basketball advances to its first Summit League championship

St. Thomas beat North Dakota 85-69 Saturday night thanks to a second-half turnaround at Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

After shooting just 11-30 from the field in the first half, the Tommie offense clicked coming out of the locker room and shot 20-32 in the rest of the game. 

“When they’re missing shots, there’s never any finger-pointing. You look, it’s not just the guys who played. It’s all 16 of them picking one another up, encouraging them,” coach Johnny Tauer said.

UST will play in the Summit League championship for the first time in program history at 8 p.m. Sunday. The Tommies’ opponent, Omaha, has already clinched a spot in the NCAA tournament as they won the regular season title and St. Thomas is still ineligible for the tournament.

In order to give the Tommies as much of a home-court advantage as they can get in a different state, the university is bussing 100 students out to Sioux Falls on Sunday. Students can buy their tickets here.

“We’ve never been here before … last two years we haven’t made it this far, so it was pretty exciting,” junior guard Kendall Blue said.

Blue led all scorers with 21 points and shot 8-14 on the night. He capped off the win with an emphatic dunk that also earned him 1,000 career points scored.

“They’re a good defensive team. I was really just taking what the defense gave. Threes, driving, getting my teammates involved. I just want to win,” Blue said.

With the game tied at 33 points apiece at the half, the Tommies reconciled one of their worst offensive stretches of the season with a 52-point second half.

“We came out probably a little bit over-excited. That stuff happens in big games. Part of the message was, ‘Just slow down, play with composure’ — all the adages that we use every single day,” Tauer said.

Graduate guard Drake Dobbs was a perfect 5-5 on the night for 15 points with five assists. 

“Drake is one of the most efficient, quintessential point guards I’ve ever seen. 15 points. He doesn’t miss a shot, doesn’t miss a free throw, doesn’t have a turnover, five assists, three rebounds and just controls the game. That doesn’t count the defensive end,” Tauer said.

Sophomore forward Carter Bjerke also chipped in 15 while junior guard Miles Barnstable added 14.

“These one-on-ones, you gotta really make some decisions and pick poisons when you play them,” Hawks coach Paul Sather said.

St. Thomas was severely outrebounded all night and had a -16 differential, tied for their fourth-worst performance on the glass all season. UND had six more offensive boards and was able to get 18 second-chance points to UST’s nine.

Tauer’s squad made up for the poor rebounding by taking care of the ball and capitalizing off the Hawks’ mistakes. After four quick turnovers in the ugly first minutes of the game, St. Thomas had just five the rest of the night.

“They were heating us up defensively, and so I thought they sped us up. So much of offense is this give and take of, ‘OK they’re speeding us up, we’ve got to actually slow down a little bit more and see what’s going on. Typically we’ve been good at that. I thought our guys showed a lot of composure the last 35 minutes,” Tauer said.

In direct contrast to Tauer’s thoughts, Sather said it was the Tommies’ fast pace that eventually wore his team down.

“We weren’t able to withstand that; we just weren’t able to kind of stay with it. We started making mistakes and having lapses,” Sather said.

First-year guard Nolan Minnesale had four of his team’s whopping 17 steals, tied for their most of the season with their game against D-III St. Norbert’s. UST scored 40 points off a season-worst 24 UND turnovers.

“They’re a team that kind of does constant pressure throughout the full 40 minutes,” UND junior guard Eli King said. “I feel like for the most part, we were pretty good with it, and we had a couple bad spells where it was turnover, bucket, there’d be another turnover right into a bucket. It’s hard to win games against a really good team like that.”

The Tommies also held UND’s senior guard Treysen Eaglestaff to just seven points the night after he dropped an NCAA D-I season-high 51. They also kept him scoreless the last time they met at Schoenecker Arena.

“They’re really physical with him. They trap a lot, or they force the ball out of his hands a lot,” Sather said.

King and sophomore guard Mier Panoam finished with 15 points and eight rebounds apiece. Senior forward Amar Kuljuhovic added 13 and six.

The Tommies’ game looked impressive from the box score. Indeed, if any of the 8,300 fans in attendance had watched just one side of the court for the first nine minutes of the game, they would have thought the Tommies had UND right where they wanted them.

By the timeout at the 11:06 mark, the Hawks had made just one of their last eight shots and zero of their last six. Eaglestaff hadn’t connected on his one attempt.

Eaglestaff had been put on lock and had three of his team’s four turnovers while they were 3-12 from the field. He ended the game with seven total turnovers.

UND was shooting poorly; the Tommies were just shooting worse.

Down just 12-7, UND had made it practically impossible for St. Thomas to get to the basket, forcing them to stick to the perimeter. 

“We missed a few good threes at a moment where they were defending us really, really well … but I also thought they were taking away the paint,” Tauer said, “So it becomes that chess matchup. We need to get in the paint, but they were doing a good job taking it away. You don’t want to just rely on threes, but you’ve got to take the ones that are presented to you.”

The Tommies were in a worse situation than UND at that same 11:06 timeout, having made just one of their last 14 shots.

About five minutes of game time later, a similar situation unfolded.

North Dakota had just gone on an 8-0 run, and the Tommies were once again in a timeout. Dobbs and Blue tried to kickstart their offense with a little 7-2 run of their own prior, but they were still down 23-14.

Coming out of the timeout, UND junior forward Deng Mayar turned a turnover from Tommie redshirt first-year guard Ben Oosterbaan into a quick layup.

After that score, senior guard Ben Nau sparked the turnaround that catapulted St. Thomas toward its first Summit League title game.

Nau went on an 8-0 run of his own when he banged two straight three-pointers and a pair of free throws. He finished the game with just those eight points because he was immediately sidelined when he picked up his third foul.

Blue and junior guard Miles Barnstable shrank the Tommies’ deficit to just 33-30. With thirteen seconds left in the half, Bjerke nailed an open three, which Sather attributed to a failed defensive switch from his team.

After toughing out one of the worst in-game stretches of their season and turning it into one of their most efficient, the Tommies were rewarded with a win and one more night in Sioux Falls.

“This is about as good a way to wrap up an evening as we could,” Tauer said.

Adam Mueller can be reached at muel7541@stthomas.edu.

The Crest student media’s coverage of the Summit League tournament is sponsored by U.S. Bank. The Crest is the independent student-run media at the University of St. Thomas.