Mistakes Costly for Long Beach

In a game featuring two of the Big West Conference’s top three scorers, defense and mistakes determined the outcome of Thursday night’s Long Beach State-Boise State game at the Pyramid.

And when the errant passes and traveling violations had stopped, Boise State was the winner, 61-57, before 2,479.

The Broncos’ Roberto Bergersen, third in the nation in scoring, was held to 15 points, nine below his average. But Gerry Washington scored 19 points, including consecutive three-point baskets, the last giving the Broncos, 13-4 overall and 6-1 in the conference, the lead for good at 54-51 with 2:19 to play.

The 49ers (8-10, 5-3) committed more turnovers, 23, than they had field goals, 17, in falling into second place in the conference’s Western Division, a half-game behind UC Santa Barbara.

“[Boise State was] aggressive defensively and we needed to take better care of passing the ball and driving through the defense and finding the open man,” said 49er Coach Wayne Morgan, who is 0-3 in his career against Boise State, the only Big West team he has yet to defeat in more than two seasons at Long Beach.

But while the 49ers mistakes were their undoing, it looked throughout most of the second half like their defense would be good enough to win.

The Broncos made only one shot in the first 10:33. And Long Beach, which got 16 points from Ramel Lloyd, the conference’s No. 3 scorer, turned a 25-25 halftime tie into a lead as big as nine points.

“We got the lead because we passed the ball and moved the ball better [than in the first half],” Morgan said. “Then they went back into a zone the rest of the game.”

The mistakes created by that zone, along with Washington’s heroics and Bergersen’s timeliness, allowed the Broncos to come back and maintain their lead the final two minutes.

Quiet most of the evening, Bergersen scored his team’s final seven points. But holding Bergersen down was little consolation for Morgan.

“All I care is that we lost,” he said. “If he scored five million and we won, I don’t care.”