The men’s basketball team won two games on Saturday and Tuesday to continue their winning streak of 13 games, tying the program record. After coming through in a close game in Allentown, Pa. against Muhlenberg, the Blue Jays hosted McDaniel and once again picked up another win. The pair of victories brings the team’s season record to 16-2 and 10-1 in the Centennial Conference.
On Saturday, the Blue Jays played a struggling Muhlenberg team that owns a losing record of 8-10 and 3-8 in the conference. An impressive performance from the Mules turned what could have been an easy win into a tough battle.
The Blue Jays held the lead early in the game by scoring the first three buckets and then holding a 10-5 lead. Muhlenberg was able to shift the momentum in the ensuing plays and even gained a 16-15 lead at one point. However, the Jays’ array of offensive weapons, such as senior guard Jimmy Hammer and sophomore forward Ryan Curran manning the middle as a center in Saturday’s game, were able to stretch the game back to a 10 point lead of 41-31.
An eight-point lead near the end of the third quarter was quickly cut to just two in the middle of the fourth. A couple of buckets from Curran and a Hammer three-pointer proved crucial to Hopkins maintaining a seven-point lead in the last minute. While Muhlenberg managed to force a turnover and make it a two-possession game with 19 seconds to go, the Blue Jays prevailed on the charity stripe, winning 80-75.
Although Muhlenberg guard Nick Rindock was the game’s leading scorer, with 24 points, the Blue Jays showcased a more balanced attack with three players scoring 15 points or more. Curran was the Blue Jays’ leading scorer with a career-high 19 points to go with nine rebounds, just one short of a double-double. Hammer was, as always, a reliable weapon for Hopkins with 18 points on 6-12 shooting and 3-6 from behind the line. Senior forward George Bugarinovic also had 15 points as well as five rebounds.
Overall the Blue Jays had a great shooting night, going 53.8 percent from the field and 41.2 percent from downtown, proving to be too much for the Muhlenberg team.
On Tuesday, Hopkins hosted another conference opponent, McDaniel, with an 11-6 record and 6-5 in the conference. The Blue Jays looked like a completely different team from Saturday, trailing 12-3 from the beginning as they were overwhelmed by the McDaniel defense. At half-time, McDaniel held a 32-25 lead, shooting a superb 56 percent from the field compared to Hopkins at just 28.6 percent.
Incredibly, Hopkins completely flipped the game around in the second half, going 50 percent from the field and locking down the McDaniel team who suddenly went down to a more humane 33 percent. The game ended up going down to the last free throws, but a clutch performance by Hammer at the line sealed the game for the Blue Jays who came back from a bad first half to win 65-59.
The Blue Jays had generally bad shooting, going 39.5 percent from the field and 28.6 percent from the three-point land, which were major drops from the Muhlenberg game. But an impressive 27-29, 93.1 percent performance at the free throw line, and 23 percent higher than the previous game could have been the edge that the struggling Hopkins team needed. Hammer was the leading scorer for Hopkins in a low-scoring game with 19 points and senior guard Omar Randall had a perfect shooting game, 2-2 and 5-5 from the line, to have an efficient nine points.
The Blue Jays were surprisingly outrebounded in both games, and especially in the McDaniel game where they trailed four rebounds to the opponents.
The team will look to amend these issues going forward as they prepare to seal their number one position in the conference and get into the NCAA tournament.
