The struggles on the road from last season continued into the 2020-2021 campaign as the Massachusetts men’s basketball team lost its first road contest of the year 78-75. UMass (1-1) picked up its first loss of the season to Northeastern (1-1) in the finale of a home-and-home series. Struggling from the start, the Minutemen couldn’t get into a rhythm offensively.
“Our offensive ratings when we have three passes or more in a game, I believe on Friday was something in the range of 1.08, which is one of the better ratings in the country in terms of your offense,” UMass coach Matt McCall said. “Especially early in the game the ball has to move more, the ball has to change sides of the floor more and you have to loosen up their defense. It was just too much one pass shots. On Friday where we had one pass shots or no pass shots, our offensive efficiency rating was .83 which would be worst in the country.”
It was fast-paced from the start of the game with both sides having trouble getting things going. Northeastern played like a different team than on Friday and came out with physicality and a mindset to shut down Tre Mitchell. Mitchell finished with 10 points on the game, getting five points in each half. The sophomore still almost finished with a double-double as he picked up eight rebounds.
“I felt like we couldn’t really put together consistent stops,” McCall said. “We couldn’t put together consistent offensive possessions. It was as if we were forgetting what we were supposed to be doing and we were forgetting our job. It was like we were asleep at different times throughout the game and then decided to wake up with about two minutes to go and tried to make a run at it.”
By halftime UMass was only trailing by one but it felt like it was a lot more. Northeastern was riding momentum thanks to key plays from Tyson Walker and Jason Strong. Walker was a problem for the Minutemen once again. Coming off a 29-point performance on Friday, Walker followed up with another double-digit figure on the stat sheet finishing with 20 points. Strong finished with 16 points going 3-of-7 from beyond the arc.
The second half saw nearly the same result as UMass struggled to create any offense and seemed pretty stagnant out on the court. Turnovers were key to Northeastern and they quickly took advantage of the costless errors by the Minutemen. Javohn Garcia got his first collegiate start in the game and played alongside Noah Fernandes at the guard spot. The combo finished with eight turnovers, doubling their assist total of four in the game. The duo still finished with 33 points but struggled trying to find Mitchell down low in the post.
“If I was going to be critical of [Javohn] and Noah, our two point guards, four assists and eight turnovers tonight we got to get better production from that,” said McCall. “We need a two-to-one assist to turnover ratio. I think those guys understand that.”
UMass nearly pulled off the comeback in the end thanks to some last-minute clutch shooting from TJ Weeks and Noah Fernandes. Weeks checked into the game with about two minutes remaining and knocked down a contested 3-pointer, managed a clutch steal and had two layups with one being an and-one.
“TJ has been in the gym the last two days at 7 a.m. and he is growing and maturing with his work effort,” McCall said. “We need to find more minutes for him because he not only scored with the ball today, but he had six rebounds and only played for 18 minutes. Some of these minutes for these other guys probably need to go down and TJ’s need to go up a little bit if he is going to rebound the ball like that.”
The Minutemen return to action on Wednesday squaring off against La Salle with a 1 p.m. tipoff.
Frederick Hanna can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @FrederickHIII
