BOISE, Idaho (March 8, 2023) – A magical tournament run for the No. 9 seeded Northern Arizona University men's basketball team in the Big Sky Conference Championships came to end in the finals, falling to No. 2 Montana State by a score of 85-78.
The Lumberjacks made it through the first three rounds of the tournament, playing four games in five days and knocking off No. 10 Idaho, No. 1 Eastern Washington and No. 4 Montana, becoming the first ever nine seed to advance to the finals. NAU ends the season 12-23 and 5-13 in Big Sky Conference play. Montana State earns the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, improving to 25-9.
NAU trailed 42-35 at the half, but kept even with the Bobcats in the second half with each team scoring 43 points. Free throws were the biggest discrepancy of the night, with the Lumberjacks making 19-of-23 and the Bobcats going 31-for-37. The Lumberjacks were only outrebounded by three and had two more turnovers than the Bobcats did – but NAU only scored two points off of miscues while MSU scored 15.
Carson Towt, who made the All-Tournament team along with
Jalen Cone, led the Lumberjacks with 16 points and nine rebounds despite fouling out with three minutes left.
Xavier Fuller, playing the last game of his career, left it all out on the floor with 15 points, three steals, and eight rebounds. True freshman
Oakland Fort, who scored in double figures in three tournament games, added 14 points. Cone rounded out the scoring with 14 points.
"I'm proud, really proud of our guys," said an emotional head coach
Shane Burcar postgame. "The way they carry themselves. They're high character on and off of the court and that's why we're standing here right now, because of the men in that locker room. There are many times where we could've said, it's not our season. We got beat by one, we got beat on a miracle buzzer beater. But they came everyday and got better. It's my 25
th year of coaching, and I don't rank the teams, but this is a very special group and I told them that this will be the team that will be part of when NAU basketball flipped for consistency not just a special season. Some of the naysayers will say that we still finished ninth, but they don't know what's going on in our locker room or on our campus and the character of our guys. To make this run, it says everything about them. It's hard to sit up here knowing we didn't reach our final goal with
Xavier Fuller, who I've known since he was a little kid with his goggles on. And
Jalen Cone, who took a chance on our program coming from the ACC, and
Nik Mains. Nik is someone who when you talk about our program, he's there, and when we start hanging banners up in the Skydome, these guys will be a big reason for that."
Northern Arizona committed two quick turnovers to start the game, leading to four points from the Bobcats. The Lumberjacks made just one of their first seven attempts from the field and trailed 9-4 by the first media timeout.
Consecutive three-pointers by Trenton McLaughlin and
Jalen Cone helped the Lumberjacks stay within reach, trailing 17-12. After MSU grew the lead out to 21-15,
Nik Mains joined in on the action with a three-pointer and cut the advantage to 21-18. After the Bobcats found their largest lead of nine points,
Carson Towt scored four-straight points to pull back within five.
With a minute to go, the Lumberjacks cut the lead to 38-35 after layups from Fuller and Cone. The Bobcats were able to score four-straight points to end the half up 42-35.
Northern Arizona battled the whole second half and made 14-of-16 free throws while MSU made 21-of-25.
Down by nine points, Fort made a triple from the corner to cut the lead to six points, 68-62. With 4:50 left, Cone was fouled on a jumper and made the free throw to make it a five point game. Despite battling, that would be the closest the lead would get as MSU stretched the lead out to the largest advantage of 12 at one point. With 31 seconds left, Fort made another three to cut the lead to seven, and Cone made two final free throw attempts, but the effort came up short.
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