Irvine’s Offense Stalls in Loss to Long Beach

UC Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan was feeling so good about his team this week that he ventured to say it was better than last year’s squad because of the “number of offensive weapons.”

After all, all five starters had scored 25 or more points in a game.

Mulligan probably hadn’t even considered the possibility that all those weapons would turn out to be duds on the same night.

Until Thursday night.

Cal State Long Beach made five of nine free throws in the final 1:12 of play and hung on for a 72-67 Big West Conference victory in front of 3,223 in the Bren Center. But this was more a game of what Irvine (11-13 overall and 8-7 in Big West play) failed to do, than what Long Beach (13-12, 10-6) accomplished.

Irvine, the No. 6 team in the country in three-point field goal percentage, made just two of 13 three-pointers. The Anteaters free-lanced all night and rarely ran the offense. And they played virtually no inside defense, allowing 49er post players to make a combined 22 of 32 shots. As a result, the 49ers shot 64% from the field.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Long Beach because they play as hard as any team we’ve faced,” Mulligan said, “but that was the absolutely worst excuse. . . . It was a pathetic first half followed by a pathetic second half.

“I can’t believe those guys would let this happen. We fell into the me-me-me syndrome. Everybody’s a . . . hero.”

Long Beach center John Hatten, who scored 37 in the first meeting between these teams, scored 16 points but played just 27 minutes because of foul problems. But it was the inside play of forward Rudy Harvey, reserve Marco Fleming and guard Tyrone Mitchell, who spends more time posting up then patrolling the perimeter, that carried the 49ers to victory.

Mitchell, who did not score in the 49ers’ loss to Las Vegas Monday night, made six of eight field goal attempts--including a rare three-pointer with 1:46 left that lifted Long Beach to a seven-point (67-60) lead--and finished with 16 points. Fleming was five of six from the floor and scored 14. Harvey made four of six and scored 11.

“I’m really proud of this group of guys,” Long Beach Coach Joe Harrington said. “They’ve overcome a lot of adversity--injuries, playing with such a short team. They’ve shown a lot of character.

“I definitely thought Mitchell would come back and play well tonight and that three-pointer was a big shot. And Marco Fleming gave us a really big game off the bench. I thought we played good down the stretch. We didn’t bend.”

From the sound of the obscenity-riddled tirade emanating from the Irvine locker room, Mulligan wasn’t dishing out much praise.

Forward Jeff Herdman, who scored 29 in the win at Fresno, made two of seven shots and scored five points. Mike Doktorczyk, the Big West player of the week last week, scored 12 points and had five turnovers. Guard Rod Palmer made four of 11 shots and finished with nine points.

Senior guard Kevin Floyd and sophomore forward Ricky Butler both had 18 points to lead Irvine.

The 49ers’ press, which caused Irvine a lot of problems in the first game--a 75-70 Long Beach win--wasn’t a factor in this one. But Long Beach’s tight man-to-man defense was. Both Herdman and Doktorczyk had their first three-point attempts partially blocked.

Still, Irvine trailed by just one (34-33) at halftime. But the Anteaters quickly fell behind, 43-37, when Long Beach went inside and scored on three quick layups and a little bank shot by Hatten.

The Anteaters battled back to tie, 59-59, with 4:53 left to play, but it took a couple of acrobatic, one-on-one maneuvers by Floyd to get it. Floyd drove by three 49ers and spun in a reverse layup and then somehow managed to loop in an off-balance, left-handed finger roll.

Fun to watch, but not exactly the kind of shots one gets out of the normal offensive scheme of things.

Irvine, which did have nine steals on the game, managed to drag out the end. A Doktorczyk follow shot after he stripped a rebound closed the gap to three with 32 seconds left, but Darrell Faulkner made both ends of a one-and-one with 29 seconds left to provide the margin of victory.

“We started going one-on-one early on and that sort of set the tone for the game,” Doktorczyk said. “Actually, we didn’t do much of anything right.”

Said Butler: “Don’t ask me how or why, but somehow the December team showed up tonight.”

Irvine was 2-5 in December, but the Anteaters thought that was just a bad memory. Thursday night, they had a flashback and it was definitely a bad trip.