Men's Basketball | 3/5/2015 6:13:00 PM
Box Score BILLINGS, Mont. (March 5) — Despite 29 points from senior
Dom Williams, the Central Washington University men's basketball team lost to Northwest Nazarene University 79-73 in quarterfinal action at the 2015 Great Northwest Athletic Conference Men's Basketball Tournament.
"Dom had a good final night in a Wildcat uniform," said CWU head coach
Greg Sparling. "I appreciate everything he's done. I thought
Terry Dawn played well. But I also think
Joseph Stroud getting in foul trouble in the first half hurt us a little bit. At the end of the day, you come all this way and you have opportunities to win and we didn't capitalize."
Dawn scored nine point, grabbed seven rebounds and had a pair of assists and steals, Stroud ended the game with 12 points, nine rebounds and two blocked shots. But the Wildcats played without the services of senior
Julian Vaughn, who sat on the game with an injured right index finger.
"I thought we were sluggish offensively and we didn't shoot the ball extremely well from the three-point line as a team," Sparling reflected. "We weren't really efficient on the offensive end and we weren't very good in our transition D [defense] tonight."
Even so, neither team led by more than nine points. NNU went ahead for good on a layup by guard Mike Wright with 8:27 left in the game. He led NNU with 20 points, four assists and three steals.
"Wright, coming down to hit those two threes to start the game, really gave him a bunch of confidence," Sparling added, pointing out that Wright only averages seven points per game on the season.
The Wildcat loss was the third this year to NNU, following two regular-season defeats by the Crusaders, 74-67 in Ellensburg, and 66-64 in Nampa, Idaho.
The sixth-seeded Crusaders, now 14-15 on the year, advance into semifinal action Friday in the GNAC tourney, facing No. 2 Seattle Pacific University. With the loss, CWU ended its season with a 17-9 record.
"Not a great season but a good season," Sparling said. "We've got a lot of young pieces to build on that got a taste of the tournament. We are young and I saw growth this year as a team and I saw younger guys get better."
