When the Massachusetts men’s basketball team needed them most, it turned to its smallest guys to clean up the mess and finish the job.

UMass trailed by as many as 14 points in the second half before its small-ball lineup turned on the jets, giving the Minutemen just enough energy to secure an 85-79 win in their season-opener against Howard Saturday.

UMass coach Derek Kellogg was forced to go to a smaller lineup down the stretch consisting of Jabarie Hinds, Trey Davis, Donte Clark, Seth Berger and Zach Coleman, with none of the players standing taller than 6-foot-8. All five finished with double-digit points.

“It’s a good way to start off the season with a win. It didn’t exactly play out the way I envisioned it in my head, but I did like the way our team fought and scrapped,” Kellogg said. “I thought our guys showed some character today.

Despite struggling for most of the game, Davis made the shots when it mattered most, scoring 10 of his 19 total points in the final two minutes, 35 seconds, including a deep 3-pointer to extend the Minutemen’s lead to four with 34 seconds remaining in the game.

Hinds tied Davis with a team-high 19 points and added eight assists, five steals and three rebounds in his debut as starting point guard. Davis was the primary point guard for the Minutemen last year, but Kellogg feels more confident with Hinds handling the ball this year to allow Davis to get more shots from the wing.

“I told (Jabarie) that when I come off the screen, just pass me the ball and I’m going to shoot it,” Davis said of his late 3-point shot.

UMass regained the lead for the first time since the 5:29 of the first half on a pair of Davis’ free throws with 1:11 remaining in the game. The Bison entered halftime with a 47-38 lead and for much of the second half looked like they were going to hold off numerous Minutemen attempts to regain the lead before Davis made both his free throws.

With center Tyler Bergantino sidelined with a shin injury, freshmen Malik Hines and Rashaan Holloway were expected to play big minutes in their collegiate debuts Saturday, barring any foul trouble. However, with the two struggling with the pace of play, Holloway – who started at center – played 12 total minutes and only three in the second half. Hines played only four minutes, all of which came in the first half.

Kellogg accredited the lack of playing time to both their lack of experience and the production that Coleman (13 points, six rebounds) and Berger (10 points, four rebounds) brought in the smaller lineup.

“I thought that Seth and Zach were playing fantastic and also we are trying to win and I thought (Malik and Rashaan) were still trying to catch up to the pace of play, and figure out if we are going to press, how hard you really have to play,” Kellogg said.

“It was a good learning curve for them pretty quickly, but I thought they did decent stuff. I thought that Rashaan had a couple good plays in the first half and those guys will get better as the season goes on.”

Coleman, at 6-foot-7, was the de facto center and made most of his impact from the high-post in the middle of the Howard zone. Coleman went to the free throw line 15 times, converting on nine of them. As a team UMass went 28-for-44 (63.6-percent) from the line.

With the smaller and faster lineup on the court, Kellogg used a series of full court presses with Berger guarding the Bison’s in-bounder. Despite not implementing it until earlier this week, Kellogg said that had it not been for the Minutemen’s ability to press full-court, they might not have pulled out the victory.

“Honestly we haven’t worked on it as much as we’d like. Our half-court defense was subpar at best in a couple of our games and I said we had to sure that up. So the press hasn’t been an afterthought but we’ve done it the last four or five days,” Kellogg said.

“I thought today, if we didn’t press, we were going to lose. So at some point, I said we’re pressing the rest of the game and let’s go. I thought we wore them down a little bit. Some of the threes they were making when they were comfortable, (they) didn’t go in down the stretch for them. And then we rebounded some of those balls, because they were getting too many extra possessions.”

Andrew Cyr can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @Andrew_Cyr.