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Broncos delight home crowd with win over rival |
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Written by Paul Bowker
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KALAMAZOO, Mich. -- Western Michigan‘s biggest rival was in town Saturday, and the Broncos responded quickly with an offensive blast in front of their largest home crowd in nearly five years.
Donald Lawson scored a career-high 17 points, the Broncos crashed the glass for 39 rebounds, then smothered Central Michigan with a strong defense in the game‘s final two minutes for a 70-61 victory over the Chippewas, who had won their first two Mid-American Conference West games.
Kool also scored 17 points for WMU (10-6, 2-1 MAC West), and moved into third place on the school‘s all-time scoring list with 1,728 points.
“It was a lot of fun out there and you could feel the energy and the buzz beforehand,“ Kool said of the 4,636 assembled at University Arena, a number not seen since WMU hosted an NIT game in March 2005.
The win moved WMU into a second-place tie in the MAC West with CMU (7-8, 2-1), behind Northern Illinois, which defeated Eastern Michigan on Saturday for its third consecutive MAC win.
The Broncos had its crowd jumping early, hitting 60 percent of their shots in the first half and scoring 11 consecutive points in a stretch that put WMU 13 points ahead. Kool began that stretch with his only 3-point shot of the game.
Lawson scored nine points and had three of his season-high four blocked shots in the first half.
“They really knocked us on our behinds from the start,” CMU coach Ernie Zeigler said.
The Broncos pushed that lead to 15 points before the Chippewas responded with a rally which pulled to within three points in the final two minutes of the game. Jordan Bitzer scored a game-high 20 points for CMU, falling just one rebound short of a double-double, and Robbie Harman scored 19. The same kind of a thing happened Wednesday night, when a 14-point WMU lead fell apart and the Broncos lost by 10 at Northern Illinois.
“All of a sudden, we started making some pretty shaky decisions with the basketball,” WMU coach Steve Hawkins said. “We really didn’t play that good of basketball in the last 12 minutes of the game.”
“Any time you take your foot off the gas pedal, the other team is going to exploit it,” Kool said. “We knew they were going to make a run, so we tried to stay calm and patient out there.”
Both Bitzer and Harman scored 13 points for the Chippewas in the second half. But after a basket by Jalin Thomas cut WMU’s lead to three, 62-59, with 1:51 left, the Chippewas went cold as WMU’s defense dug in. CMU went 1:44 without scoring a point as Bronco shooters hit 8-of-10 free throws.
“We just kind of grinded it out and got some big stops when we needed it,” Hawkins said.
The Chippewas also had a stretch of nearly seven minutes in the first half when they scored just one basket. Inside, the Broncos dominated CMU, outscoring them 32-12 and outrebounding the Chippewas, 39-33.
“They came right at us and were always getting into us when we were starting our offense,” Bitzer said. “They closed the gaps well and we didn‘t hit our open shots today.”
One of the few times the Chippewas did hit those open shots came on their first three possessions of the second half, when three consecutive 3-point baskets by Harman (2) and Bitzer cut WMU‘s lead to five points with 18:24 to play.
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