Coming off a spectacular win over Missouri-St. Louis Thursday night, the Truman Men’s Basketball team had a slightly less heart pounding performance on Saturday as they defeated Maryville 77-68. Masen Miller led the team with 17 points, including five three pointers, while Cade McKnight grabbed a team high seven boards and scored 15. Elijah Hazekamp scored 16, dished out seven assists and grabbed six boards while Hunter Strait led the team with eight assists, tying a career high. Truman had their best shooting performance of the season, going 31-51 (60.8%) from the field.
Like Thursday, Truman didn’t have their best form out of the gates and it allowed Maryville to take a 19-12 lead with 12:01 left in the first half. But from there, Truman exploded for a 20-0 run to flip the script and go up 13. McKnight had eight points in the run while Miller drained three threes and Hazekamp put in a triple. As the half would down MU cut the lead to six but a jumper from Hazekamp and a layup by Eric Northweather, who made his first career start, put Truman back up ten points at intermission 36-26.
In the second half, Truman had a 7-0 run early to set the tone for much of the half. Northweather began the run with a layup and then McKnight followed with one of his own, then a three point play by Northweather put Truman up 16 at 48-32. Truman expanded their lead to as large as 19 at 58-39 following a three pointer from Miller with 12:42 to go. Maryville chipped away and made it a 13 point game but with 10:57 to go Keaton Mitchell got on the board with a jumper in the paint, then got an offensive rebound off a miss that allowed Trey Shearer to hit his first three of the game 30 seconds later. After a Maryville basket, Northweather found Mitchell under the bucket for a layup and then with 9:10 to go Hazekamp found Mitchell backdoor on an alley-oop.
Truman kept their lead in double digits until the final minute. With 56 seconds to go MU made it 74-66 and then made it a six point game with 45 seconds left. But Sam Nissen sank two foul shots with 22 seconds left and then Hazekamp went 1-2 with 12 seconds to go to seal the nine point win.
The Bulldogs will pause conference play until January, and for the rest of this month have two nonconference games, starting with Central Christian College of the Bible on the 11th and then Grand View University on the 29th.