AMHERST — Matt McCall was pretty sure he heard something come out of Carl Pierre’s mouth as soon as the ball left his hand.
The UMass coach couldn’t make out exactly what his junior captain said as he released a 3-point shot with 1 minute, 49 seconds left in the game. McCall wasn’t sure if Pierre told the ball to get in or was confident that his shot was going to fall. But as the ball hung in the air, the Mullins Center was quiet, ready to explode if it did fall inside the rim.
Pierre entered the game having made just six of his 39 attempts from behind the arc in the previous six games. He made just one of his first five 3-pointers in the game, too, but the junior has never stopped shooting. And with the game on the line, Pierre let one fly and it fell to break a tie and propel the Minutemen to a 67-63 win over Saint Louis on Tuesday night.
“Carl deserves to make it,” McCall said. “That’s our leader. Carl is never going to stop shooting, if he stops shooting, he’s got to come out. He’s struggled shooting the ball the last six games, maybe that one got him going, but we want him to continue to shoot, we’re going to continue to run plays to get him shots and that was a big shot, probably one of the bigger ones of his career.”
Once Pierre made the shot to put UMass (11-15, 5-8 Atlantic 10) up 65-62, it was up to the young Minutemen to do what they couldn’t do in the conference opener at Saint Louis on Jan. 5. In that game, UMass blew a five-point lead in overtime and lost to the Billikens (18-8, 7-6), but it was a far different story in the final two minutes of regulation Tuesday.
After Pierre’s 3-pointer, the Minutemen successfully fouled Hasahn French when he touched the ball and the Saint Louis center made the first free throw before missing the second one. After Sean East II missed a layup, UMass hunkered down and earned a defensive stop before East redeemed himself with a well-executed pick-and-roll with Tre Mitchell to supply the final scoreline.
“They did what we were asking them to do down the stretch unlike at their place, and we found a way to get a great win,” McCall said. “… The game was not going well for us in the first half, there were times it was not going well in the second half. I was trying to find the right combinations of guys to play. Our guys gutted it out.”
There were very few positives UMass could take out of the first half as the Minutemen looked disjointed and out of sync on offense for the opening 20 minutes. McCall complained about the lack of ball movement and it took Preston Santos knocking down a pair of early 3-pointers and Dibaji Walker discovering his mid-range jumper to help keep UMass competitive. The duo combined for 17 of the Minutemen’s 28 points in the first half as their teammates shot just 5 of 21 from the floor, including 1 of 11 from deep.
Meanwhile, the Billikens strung together three separate 10-0 runs to stretch their lead to as many as 16. Walker scored seven of his nine first-half points after Saint Louis extended its advantage to those 16 points, helping trim the deficit to seven at halftime despite Mitchell, the Minutemen’s leading scorer, limited to two points at halftime.
“I seen Tre was struggling and I knew I had to do something,” Walker said. “I went in, rebounded, defended and when Coach called my number, got the buckets I could.”
In the second half, though, UMass unleashed Mitchell and the freshman big man was back to being his dominant self on the floor. He scored 22 points over the final 20 minutes, controlling the floor no matter which of Saint Louis’ two post players were defending him. The Minutemen did a better job at exploiting the Billikens’ big men, too, with Mitchell using the fact both French and Jimmy Bell Jr. were in foul trouble for most of the half.
“When Bell was in the game, we wanted to pull Bell away from the basket, get Tre isolated on the elbow and let him go,” McCall said. “When French was in the game, I felt like French was going to be afraid to foul so we wanted to get Tre on the block. We did a good job of executing that in the second half.”
Closing out a win over the Billikens was important for the Minutemen as they enter the final five games of the regular season. McCall said he had emphasized to his team leading into the contest about the importance of proving to themselves and the league that UMass could beat some of the better teams in the Atlantic 10 and use it as a sign of progress.
The challenge for UMass is proving it can play with this consistent energy against some of the cellar dwellers in the league, like Fordham, the Minutemen’s next opponent.
“Knowing if we can beat them and they’re one of the top teams in the A10, it’s not really different than any other team,” Santos said. “I tell the team all the time, if we play how we know we can play and what we know we’re capable of doing, we can beat anybody. That brings us a lot of confidence.”