BUTTE, Mont. – (RV) Lewis-Clark State Men's Basketball opened its weekend in Butte with a 75-47 loss to No. 18 Montana Tech on Friday night. The Orediggers made nearly 50 percent of their shots and disrupted the Warrior offense throughout the night to earn their fifth win of the season.
"Tonight was all about Tech imposing its will on us for 40 minutes," Head Coach
Austin Johnson said. "We have been working as a team to try and take care of the ball and keep people out of the paint, but tonight neither of those things happened. Credit to Tech. We will hopefully learn from this and find ways to be better and more competitive moving forward as a team."
Both teams were held off the board for nearly three minutes after a game-opening bucket by Montana Tech. The Orediggers pushed the lead to 5-0 before
Anthony Peoples Jr. scored the first LC State basket at 14:20. Tech grew the margin to 11-2 by 12:27 before
Silas Bennion made of pair of free throws to make it 11-4 at 12:17.
Keegan Crosby cut into another Oredigger run with a jumper at 9:55, and a 3 by
Kai Warren at 8:10 had the deficit at 20-9. Bennion,
Davian Brown, Crosby,
Sam Stockton and
Oreon Courtney each found the basket in the final five minutes of the half but the Warriors headed to the locker room trailing 38-20.
Courtney got the scoring started in the second half with a layup 15 seconds in, and a jumper by Crosby made it back-to-back buckets 30 seconds later. Courtney made it a six-point run with a layup to cut the deficit to 38-26 at 18:34. Bennion and
Will Abram answered Tech baskets before the Orediggers surged to grow their advantage to 52-30 at 15:51.
Peoples Jr., Stockton and
John Lustig tallied three straight baskets to bring the score to 54-37 in favor of Tech at 11:38, but the Diggers continued to control the pace of play. Montana Tech closed out the contest with a 75-47 final score.
Peoples Jr. and Bennion led LC State with eight points each and Bennion led the defense with seven rebounds and three steals.
UP NEXT
The Warriors wrap up the weekend in Butte on Saturday with a rematch against Providence (Mont.) at 1 p.m. PT.
Stay up to date with all things Warrior Athletics at lcwarriors.com and on social media @LCWarriors.
