Monday, February 14, 2022

PORTLAND, Ore. – In this season’s tight seeding race for GNAC men’s basketball, it takes a definitive stretch of sustained strong play to separate from the pack, and that’s exactly what Northwest Nazarene provided over the past seven days.

The Nighthawks went 3-0 on the week, including two consecutive wins over a team that entered the game at the top of the conference standings, beating Saint Martin’s 71-65 on Tuesday, Alaska Anchorage 70-66 on Thursday and Alaska 70-63 on Saturday. In the process, NNU advanced themselves into second place in the GNAC Points Rating System (PRS) standings and earned this week’s GNAC Team of the Week award.

"It was great to be able to compete against some really good GNAC teams at home again,” head coach Paul Rush said. “Our players brought a high level of focus to be able to move from a big game on Tuesday to other ones on Thursday and Saturday."

Northwest Nazarene jumped out early, taking halftime leads into the locker room on all three occasions. Freshman point guard Tru Allen was the star of the week for NNU, averaging 17 points per game and scoring 16 or more in all three contests. The Nighthawks finished with three scorers in double figures in each game. Alongside Allen, it was George Reidy (18 points) and Christian Rose (11) against Saint Martin’s, Reidy (17) and James Nelson (19) against Alaska Anchorage and Nelson (16) and Gabriel Murphy (12) against Alaska. The Nighthawks lead the conference with 38.9 rebounds per game and rank second with 7.5 steals per game, and both were key to NNU’s success this week.

Saint Martin’s entered Johnson Sports Center on an absolute tear, having won 10 of their previous 12 games. The high-flying Saints shot 53 percent from the field and narrowly outrebounded NNU 31-30, but the Nighthawks stymied SMU’s offensive effort by forcing 15 steals and 22 turnovers to hold the Saints to 65 points, well under their season average of 79.6 per game. Allen and Nelson combined for an 11-0 run that turned a one-point Nighthawks deficit into a 10-point lead with 6:40 to play that effectively put the game out of reach.

The win over Saint Martin’s knocked the Saints out of first place, and Alaska Anchorage stepped into the top spot just before coming into Nampa themselves. Northwest Nazarene set the tone with physical play, outscoring the Seawolves in the paint 32-24 and outrebounding them 39-31. The Nighthawks raced out to a 21-4 lead in the game’s first eight minutes and led by 15 at the half, and while the Seawolves closed the deficit in the second half, they never led in an eventual 70-66 NNU win.

Northwest Nazarene truly grabbed the Team of the Week torch with a Saturday win over last week’s pick, Alaska. Allen scored a season-high 19 points and Nelson (16 points, nine rebounds) and Murphy (12 points, eight rebounds) just missed double-doubles, but NNU truly made its mark on the defensive side. The Nighthawks held the conference’s then-leading scorer, UAF’s Shadeed Shabazz, to 11 points on 5 of 14 shooting. They also held Nanooks guard Quin Barnard, who makes a GNAC-leading 3.4 three-pointers per game, without a three-point basket and to just two points total.

“I was really encouraged by our defensive efforts in these games,” Rush said. “But we are going to have to double down on those efforts to be ready for a really good team on Thursday in Saint Martin’s.”

In the ever-changing landscape of this GNAC men’s basketball season, Northwest Nazarene will now be the one with the target on its back in its next games: a Thursday rematch with Saint Martin’s in Lacey and a Saturday road game at Western Oregon, which has won two straight.