Mens Basketball: Second-half offense helps the Irish overwhelm Hokies
By ANDREW SOUKUP
Sports Writer
The grin on Matt Carroll's face showed how happy he was to get a win.
The red scratches stretching from his neck to his collarbone showed what he had to go through to get it.
Carroll scored a team-high 25 points Saturday afternoon to lead the Irish past Virginia Tech 98-76 after Notre Dame led by just one point at the half.
The turning point in the game, in Carroll's opinion, came early in a physical second-half. When he chased after a lose ball in front of the Notre Dame student section, Hokies guard Bryant Matthews violently shoved the Irish senior into the cheerleaders, leaving him with a pair of marks on a his neck and a burning desire to get even.
"I got a little angry, and it started coming out," he said. "I wanted to make them pay for it."
He did, keying a second-half explosion that yielded 64 points – eight more than the Irish scored in the entire game against West Virginia Tuesday.
Simply put, Notre Dame's second-half offense was unstoppable. The Irish shot 71.9 percent from the field, including 63.6 percent from behind the 3-point line. At times, the game resembled less a Big East contest and more like a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition.
Irish guard Chris Thomas tied a season high with 13 assists to complement his 21 points and six rebounds. While he committed seven turnovers, Thomas often threw nifty passes between Hokie defenders to wide-open Notre Dame players under the basket.
"That's how it's supposed to be," he said. "Everybody shared the ball really well and when we do that, we're going to be a heck of a team to beat."
Notre Dame's second-half output paralleled the first five minutes of the game, when the Irish exploded to a 16-4 lead. But after a lethargic rest of the half, the Hokies had climbed back into the game and trailed 34-33.
"We forced transition a little too much," Irish coach Mike Brey said. "We had it easy in the first four minutes, but once they adjusted and took some things away, we kept forcing it and probably shot some quick threes."
But after a halftime talk where the Irish challenged themselves to play aggressively for the entire second half, the Irish started lighting up the Hokies.
After Matthews – who also shoved Thomas to the ground twice and hit Miller hard enough to send him to the locker room for stitches – started getting physical, the Irish started getting hot. With Notre Dame leading 40-37, the Irish reeled off 20 of the game's next 27 points to blow the game wide open.
Part of Notre Dame's spurt came from Torrian Jones, who scored 12 points in 31 minutes and. Jones, whom Carroll compared to the Energizer bunny, keyed the Irish on the defensive end but also scored a variety of points thanks to slashing drives.
The final 10 minutes of the game quickly turned into a Notre Dame highlight reel. First Tom Timmermans, whose family was in town from the Netherlands, sliced through the line for an athletic tip-dunk.
Then Carroll and Thomas started scoring at will from behind the arc. Miller, who finished with 22 points, threw down a reverse dunk on a fast break.
Even walk-on Dan Lustig got into the act with a 3-pointer in the game's final seconds.
The blowout was a welcome change for the Irish, who have had seven of their last eight games decided by 10 points or fewer.
"All the security guards and older people keep saying we need to stop taking it down to the wire," Thomas said. "They're getting scared."
All Sports Stories for Monday, February 24, 2003
