Pacific ends Cal Poly’s tournament run, 55-53

Cal Poly fell in a heartbreaker on Friday night. By Will Parris – Parris Studios

The fans filed out of the Honda Center into a mild March evening in Orange County. The arena would wait until the championship games the next evening. On the women’s side, Cal Poly would be there. For the men, a long trip back to San Luis Obispo awaited them.

After a game with 18 lead changes and 14 ties, Pacific used a long tip-in from Travis Fulton with one second remaining to upend Cal Poly 55-53 and end their Big West Tournament run.

“Every possession meant so much and it felt like the last four minutes of the game for the entire game,” said 25th year Pacific head coach Bob Thomason, whose final Big West game will be Saturday night. “Cal Poly played great, we played great, both teams playing great defense, both teams playing physical. If it had gone 15 seconds longer, maybe Cal Poly would have hit the shot to win the game.”

Instead, it was Fulton who made SportsCenter’s top-10 and advanced his team one step closer to the NCAA Tournament.

“What you want to do is crash the boards for that last-second tip in,” said Fulton. Crash the boards he did.

It was a game of fits and starts. Neither team built more than a 4-point lead. Both teams missed  opportunities to make shots or execute offensively, defenses of both teams instead ruling the day.

The one offensive player who had any rhythm on either team was Tony Gill. The junior transfer from Roseville, CA did his best Kevin Pittsnoggle impression, stepping out beyond the 3-point line and knocking down big-shot after big-shot late in the game. Gill finished with 20 points, shooting 7-8 from the field including 4-4 from long-range.

“The coach did a great job of calling specific plays, a lot of pick-and-pop stuff, and the guards were able to get off the screens efficiently and get me the ball so the opportunity’s there and I just tried to make the best of it,” said Gill.

For the Mustangs, re-creating the home magic that saw them go undefeated at Mott Athletic Center proved to be a tough task in the Honda Center. Both coaches seemed to think the game could have gone either way after it was over.

“Sometimes I guess the basketball Gods look at a guy who says he’s got 25 years and it’s his swan song and if that game is maybe 39 minutes long or 41 minutes long, maybe we get it but it’s a 40 minute game and that last possession, that last bounce and that last tip-in goes to them and it’s a great opportunity,” said Cal Poly head coach Joe Callero.

Cal Poly was led by Chris Eversley, who scored 12 points and pulled down five rebounds while battling a cold. Senior Dylan Royer chipped in 10 points and three rebounds in what is probably his final game for Cal Poly. According to this story in the Tribune, the Mustangs still have a shot at going to one of the “lesser known” postseason tournaments after posting an 18-13 record while winning the most Big West regular season games in school history.

Royer had a shot come up short in Cal Poly’s final possession.

It’s kind of a blur at this point, so many lead changes and ties throughout the game,” said the 5th-year senior from Los Osos. “It was a tie game, we had the ball, I thought we had a decent possession, missed a shot, I couldn’t get the rebound, but we were definitely confident in our defensive abilities in that last possession. The guy made a great play. There was great defense on the first shot and, you know, Fulton made an incredible falling-down shot. Gotta give credit to him. Not much else we could do.”

Fellow senior Chris O’Brien seemed like a man on a mission in the second half for Cal Poly, willing himself to the paint to keep the Mustangs’ offense moving. O’Brien netted 11 points — all in the second half — and pulled down 5 rebounds.

For a Cal Poly team that has talked all year about assist-to-turnover ratio, the Mustangs were stymied by Pacific’s defense, which took away driving lanes and forced Cal Poly’s facilitators to try to score. In his last game against Cal Poly, Thomason coached a gem. Cal Poly had only 8 assists as a team and 10 turnovers.

“They do a great job preparing, and you have to be real patient,” said Thomason. “You’ve just got to grind, and even though we don’t like it that slow and that grinding, if we didn’t accept it and feel good about it, we weren’t going to win the game. You can’t be irritated about it because that’s what they want you to do.”

Most of the fans were gone. Back to their hotels or homes — those clad in orange ready to come back and do it again twice the next day. Instead of Cal Poly fielding teams in both the men’s and women’s final, the team from Stockton in their final season in the conference is going out with a bang.

In the mostly-empty parking lot, after all the press conferences and post-game responsibilities had been satisfied a tunnel of green, gold, and brass materialized. So did the Cal Poly men. It was only the second game the band had seen the men’s team lose all year. Echoing across the mostly empty Honda Center parking lot, it was also one of their biggest cheers.