New Strategy by Santa Clara Outwits USD

This game went from alley fight to alley oops .

When Santa Clara and the University of San Diego get together, you expect some gritty defense and low scores. That was true--for a while.

Then Santa Clara started running alley-oop plays to their smallest player, point guard Melvin Chinn. After that, burly 7-1 Ron Reis--possibly the biggest man ever to play in the West Coast Conference--took over for a while. That was the long and the short of it, and it boiled down to a 73-55 Santa Clara victory.

The win was Santa Clara’s fifth in a row, raising the Broncos’ record to 9-10 and allowing them to stay in second place behind Pepperdine in the WCC at 5-1.

The loss dropped USD (11-8, 3-3) into fourth in the eight-team WCC.

In shooting 39% before a crowd of 2,954 in Toso Pavilion, the Toreros made more turnovers--16--than field goals--14--in this game. They might have made up for it at the free-throw line, where they got 39 shots to the home team’s 21, but made only 25.

The Toreros, down 29-20 at the half, cut the lead to 42-40 with 11:25 to play. But Santa Clara answered with a 17-4 run, capped by yet another alley-oop to Chinn to put the game away. Chinn finished with 22 points.

“I can’t tell you exactly what happened,” said Torero Coach Hank Egan, who finally reached the boiling point with 4:31 left, drawing a technical foul. “We cut it to two, then we had a couple bad shot selections, then they hit us with the press and we threw it away. We didn’t execute very well. . . . We came unglued, and we’ve been a pretty good team against pressure all season.”

Egan was also unhappy the way Reis established himself in the lane in the second half, when he scored 12 of his 15 points. “We got the only league in America without the three-second call,” Egan fumed. “He’s 7-1 and he hangs around in there and you can’t do anything about it so you’ve gotta work around him. That’s why they came up with that rule, in the days of George Mikan, so the guy can’t camp out there, and I don’t think it was called once the whole night.” It wasn’t.

And, uh, how about those alley-oops? The first two, in the first half, came against Geoff Probst. So Wayman Strickland was switched to Chinn. He was burned for the third, plus a foul.

“That’s a joke, hell,” Egan said, barely able to put his frustration into words.

Chinn said the play was a new wrinkle installed this week to take advantage of teams overplaying high-scoring forward Rhea Taylor, who had 12 points. “Teams want to pressure Rhea, so we started going back door,” Chinn said, adding with a grin, “It really worked well tonight.”

USD forward Gylan Dottin, who had a season-high 20 points and nine rebounds, said, “After it happens once you should expect it next time down. We were kinda sleeping.”

The Toreros shot 31% in the first half and still could have led if they had managed better than 10 for 17 at the foul line. After hitting their first field goal, the Toreros missed their next nine, going 10 minutes without one. They had six field goals in the half.

Kelvin Woods had 13 points for USD but Santa Clara dogged him into one-for-eight shooting. Strickland also had 13 points, all in the second half.

Santa Clara shot 52.7% in the game, 61.5% in the second half.

“In league play you know one another pretty well, so you try to take away their strengths,” Santa Clara Coach Carroll Williams said. “Our defense bothered ‘em, just like their defense bothered us. Kelvin really hurt us down there (in a 67-58 USD victory Jan. 11) with kickout passes from the low post so we tried not to give them much peripherally.”

And mixed in a few new wrinkles that put them over the top.