Knights look to rebound in AAC conference play

It’s been a tough time leaving the holiday season for the UCF men’s basketball team, losing in a blowout at home to Louisville (14-3, 3-1) 90-65 on New Year’s Eve, then barely escaping a loss to Temple (5-10, 0-5) with a 78-76 nail-biter four days later.

But UConn (13-3, 1-2) turned the Knights’ only American Athletic Conference loss into a trend with an 84-61 trouncing in Storrs, Conn.

In that game the Knights (9-5, 1-2), who had gotten used to seeing double-digit scoring by four to five players per night, were led by Isaiah Sykes with 17 points, and Tristan Spurlock and Eugene McCrory who barely made their way into double digits.

The Huskies’ depth showed, as they played 14 players in the game, gaining 41 points from the bench. The Knights only used four backup players all night, getting a mere 12 points from them in a combined 50 minutes on the court.

The Huskies dominated in the paint, out-rebounding the Knights 50-33, with a yawning 32-19 gap on offensive rebounds. The Knights frequently failed to get second chances at the basket, and that may have cost them the margin of victory. The Knights took 64 shots to the Huskies’ 63, but picked up 13 less offensive rebounds when shots were off the mark. The Huskies converted that into 21 second chance shots to the Knights’ 10.

That may have been because of the Huskies’ aggressive defense, which forced the Knights to shoot one of their worst games in years, with only 31.3 percent of shots falling. Kasey Wilson, who had played the role of the Knights’ sharpshooter in their takedown of Temple, hit just one of his seven shot attempts on the night. Credit that low shooting percentage also to the Huskies’ 14 blocked shots on the night to the Knights’ two.

The game had started out promisingly for the Knights, who went on a 6-0 scoring run to start the game. But just after five minutes deep into the first half, the Huskies already had a lead they would never relinquish.

The Knights seemed to come alive early in the second half when they whittled an 11-point Huskies lead down to four points just two minutes into the second half. The scoring gap would yo-yo until just under the nine-minute mark, when the Knights seemed to lose steam. It only got worse until the final buzzer, with the Knights missing their final five shots as the gap blew open to 23 points, the widest and final margin of the game.

“We’ve got to regroup,” Head Coach Donnie Jones told UCFKnights.com after the game. “We can’t get down. We’ve got to be able to learn from this.”

The Knights played a big one at Rutgers (7-9, 1-2) Wednesday night at press time. They’ll return home Jan. 18 to host conference rival SMU (11-4, 1-2) at noon. The last time they played SMU, when both teams were in Conference USA in the 2012-13 season, the Knights won 74-65 on the strength of 21 points and 10 rebounds from Isaiah Sykes.