Merrimack College won a chess match of a men’s college basketball game at Memorial Gym in Orono on Sunday, outdueling UMaine by a score of 71-65.
UMaine’s small lineup was tested by Merrimack’s aggressive zone defense, which limited the Black Bears to only 16 points in the first 16 minutes on 6-for-21 shooting. With four Warriors along the perimeter, the Black Bear ball-handlers struggled to move — or shoot — the ball all first half, committing 10 turnovers along the way.
“We never got fully comfortable,” second-year head coach Chris Markwood said. “We made a couple runs against (the zone), but we got a little too passive at times — too much to get some consistency on the offensive end.”
Reigning Northeast Conference champion Merrimack improved to 2-1 with the win.
The momentum changed to UMaine’s favor right before the break, when Merrimack lost sophomore forward Jordan Derkack to a sprained ankle, and UMaine’s Ja’Shonte Wright-McLeish hit three of four 3-pointers to help take a 29-28 lead.
“My teammates just found me hidden in the corner,” Wright-McLeish said. “The guards are really good at finding us. It was pretty easy to knock them in.”
The graduate student was UMaine’s leading scorer with 17 points on 5-for-7 shooting, plus two rebounds. He averaged 7.8 points per game last season, and is averaging 10.3 so far this year.
In the second half, the Black Bears countered Merrimack’s scheme by attacking quicker in transition, and getting the ball down low with their forwards as much as possible. UMaine’s trio of junior Quion Burns, junior Kristians Feierbergs and senior Peter Filipovity combined for 31 points on the night, complementing Wright-McLeish’s 17.
Unfortunately for the Black Bears, it wasn’t enough to outpace Merrimack and their 5-foot-10 freshman guard Adam Clark. The bouncy Philadelphia native exploded for 17 points, two assists and six fouls drawn in the second half — including two stunning and-one buckets at the rim — to hand UMaine its second loss of the year.
“They put the ball in [Clark’s] hands, and we didn’t do a good job of keeping him out of the paint,” Markwood said. “He made some great plays.”
Now at 1-2, the Black Bears will look to get back to .500 in North Florida this weekend, where they will play Northwestern State, Presbyterian College, and host UNF in three days at the multi-team event.
“It’s great. We need that right now, we need to just play,” Markwood said. “The college game of basketball is these one- or two-possession games — learning how to win these games in the fire, with a new group.”
