GUELPH—For the second straight weekend the Varsity Blues men’s basketball team followed up an impressive Friday night win with a Saturday night loss as U of T split a pair of away games on their first road trip of the regular season.
After three Blues players reached double digits in points in a 72-65 win at Brock Friday night, U of T only managed to find one decent scoring source Saturday at Guelph and paid the price, losing 76-70. Tom Grochmal scored an impressive 21 points, aided by four of six shooting from downtown against the Gryphons, but nobody else could top nine points while four Guelph players scored in double digits to make the difference in the game.
Grochmal said that it was tough for U of T to get back-to-back road wins against tough opponents.
“We were on an emotional high last night. We beat Brock in their home opener. We tried to reproduce that, but we couldn’t.”
However, Blues head coach Ken Olynyk was having none of those sorts of excuses, saying that the loss boiled down to effort.
“At Brock we stole passes to the post, we fronted guys in the post. They never got the ball where they wanted,” said the coach after the Guelph loss. “Tonight they got it at will wherever they wanted and that hurts.”
U of T had their chances to pull off the road sweep, mostly thanks to 10 of 17 shooting from three-point range against the Gryphons, but overall the team’s shooting percentage was a starkly contrasting 35.7 percent (see number cruncher). Another major problem area for the Blues was foul trouble as both Joseph Heale and Grochmal fouled out and three others finished the contest with four fouls, while only one Gryphon had four fouls on the night. In fact, one Guelph player alone (Julius Kyle) went to the free throw line 18 times—the same amount of free throw attempts the entire U of T team had (the Gryphons had 41 trips to the charity stripe in all.) However, the true Jekyll and Hyde of the weekend was the women’s basketball team, who lost by 25 points (65-40) at Brock Friday night, but managed an astonishing turnaround to beat the Gryphons by that same 25-point margin, 67-42, Saturday evening. Jacqueline Armour led the women with 13 points in the loss to Brock, followed by 14 points in the defeat of the Gryphons. The final stunning stat from the Women Blues side of the ledger was that in their win they outshot their foe by over 21 percent in field goals (55.3 –34.0%) one night after nearly being doubled in the same category (52.2-27.1%).
You never know what you are going to get from U of T’s basketball teams this season, but you can usually count on it being interesting.
Special thanks to the SAC Blue Crew for making the road trip to Guelph for this and the women’s hockey game possible.
