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ATHENS, Ohio -- On a night when the Mid-American Conference‘s leading scorer was in town, Ohio‘s Tommy Freeman stole the show.
Freeman scored a career-high 30 points Tuesday night, making 11-for-15 shots, leading the hot-shooting Bobcats to a 90-74 win over Western Michigan.
How hot? The Bobcats made more than half their shots overall (32-of-59) and hit 60 percent of them from 3-point range. Four Ohio starters reached double figures in scoring, including Freeman and Indiana transfer Armon Bassett (21 points, game-high 9 assists) as the Bobcats broke WMU’s defensive press by simply hitting shots.
“We ran into a blazing team tonight,” WMU head coach Steve Hawkins said. “They shot the ball incredibly well. We looked like we were playing in cement boots tonight.“
After an 0-4 start in the MAC, the Bobcats have won four of their last six games and shown they might be a factor in the league race down the stretch. They play host to MAC West leader Central Michigan on Thursday.
Tuesday, they didn’t shut down WMU senior guard David Kool, the MAC’s leading scorer and WMU’s all-time leading scorer. Kool scored 19 points against the defensive efforts of Bassett, but both Bassett and Freeman outscored Kool, who hit just 6-of-18 shots.
“I just wanted to play tenacious defense on him,” Bassett said. “He’s a good scorer, so he found his way to get 19 points, but he took 18 shots, so we’ll live with that.”
“Armon really did a great job,“ Ohio head coach John Groce said.
Martelle McLemore scored a career-high 24 points for WMU (13-11, 5-6), which lost four of six games to MAC East teams in a stretch of two weeks -- a brutally tight schedule that faced every MAC team during this inter-divisional period and has drawn criticism from several coaches. The Broncos don’t play again until Sunday, when they open the second half of their schedule against MAC West teams by hosting Eastern Michigan.
“We seemed a step slow,“ said Kool, who hit a game-winning shot in the final seconds Saturday against Bowling Green. “I’m sure some of it was tired legs and some of it was just mental fatigue. We just have to get back to being us.“
While Ohio (13-11, 4-6) won this game with its shooting, the Bobcats had a season-high 25 assists. In addition to Bassett’s nine assists, guard D.J. Cooper had eight to go along with 11 points and team-high nine rebounds.
“For us to have 25 assists, which is a season high, is tremendous in terms of sharing the ball and making the extra pass,” Groce said. “I thought we did that well tonight.”
“We were doing a great job of just finding the open man,” Freeman said.
The Bobcats put this one away early, pulling ahead by 20 points in the first half on 58.6 percent shooting. Bassett scored 19 of his 21 points in the first half, and Kool was held to five points.
WMU trimmed a 23-point deficit to 13 with less than five minutes left in the game, but couldn’t cut the gap any further. Freeman answered three consecutive WMU misses with a defensive rebound, then hitting both free throws after getting fouled with 2:37 left.
WMU’s Donald Lawson grabbed a game-high 10 rebounds. |
