STARKVILLE – Mississippi State guard Josh Hubbard had the ball in his hands with a nine-point lead and a ticking clock when he saw what he’d gotten only in short supply on Wednesday: a one-on-one matchup.
Oklahoma’s Nijel Pack was pressing up on the junior Bulldog, needing a stop to keep his time alive at Humphrey Coliseum. He had defensive help waiting behind him, and he would need it, but there wasn’t much left to be done. Hubbard was locked in on winning his matchup in winning time.
“I think that goes back to playing my brothers one-on-one,” Hubbard said after the game. “I think everybody has that one-on-one game in them, but you’ve got to get it on the court here and there. Just taking advantage of it, and having that confidence to go one-on-one.”
He entered his dance, feigning right, left, and right again as space opened up. By that point he was past Pack and pulling up from mid-range. Sooner forward Tae Davis had left his man to put a hand up. Pack even came in late with another hand, fouling Hubbard, but it didn’t bother the MSU guard one bit. The shot was good, and so was the and-one, and the Bulldogs were pulling away.
“I don’t think any of us in this room can really understand what that feels like,” MSU head coach Chris Jans said in his postgame press conference. “I was a Division III player, I was pretty good, but I don’t know what that feels like.”
The traditional three-point play came in the middle of a run that saw Hubbard score 12 in a span of just under three minutes. It started with sinking MSU’s first three-pointer of the night, and ended with another mid-range jumper to give MSU an 18-point advantage, the largest lead of the night, with just 3:41 to play.
MSU would win 72-53, taking the second half by a 45-26 margin, and improve its record to 10-5 with a 2-0 start to SEC play.
Hubbard’s 30 points followed a joint career best 38 in an overtime win at Texas last weekend, making it three 30+ nights in the last five games. He’s helped his team to six wins in that time, as both he and the Bulldogs round into form at the start of conference play. The improvement is noticeable, even for a player who had shown for two years that he could shoot the lights out in any building in college basketball.
“I don’t need to keep talking about how hard he works, but why not? He deserves it,” Jans continued. “He’s about the right stuff, puts the time in, works on his craft. He’s developing now as a scorer. He’s always been a scorer, but the levels of scoring. The finished package that he has, with high releases, floaters, being able to take more quality shots even if he takes a big number of shots. If things aren’t going his way, he’s 1-7 from three, okay, I’m gonna get to the line, I’m gonna get to the cup. Figure out a way to help my team.”
Despite the high scoring total for Hubbard and the team in the second half, the game against the Sooners got off to a bit of a slow start. The teams went into halftime tied 27-27, and MSU had missed on more than a few opportunities to maintain a strong lead at the break. The Bulldogs shot a woeful 0-12 from beyond the arc while shooting just 34.4% from the floor in total. The game was still in the balance, and it was the Bulldogs who took it by force in the paint as the second half went on.
Jans was asked if there was a directive to take less shots from distance, but he gave credit to his players for finding what worked and keeping at it as the game went on.
“We talked about trying to get to the line more, paint touches and things of that nature, but no way I’m going to walk in there and tell some of these guys, our better shooters, not to shoot the ball,” Jans said when asked about the push into the paint in the second half. “The cool thing is they didn’t as much, they shot three in the second half, they were 2-3, and some of that is the basketball IQ showing up.”
The production down low reflected well on the statsheet. The Bulldogs outscored OU 36-18 in the paint, and got 19 second chance points. Center Quincy Ballard scored 10 while Jamarion Davis-Fleming had one of his best nights as a Bulldog, scoring eight with 10 boards, two blocks and one steal in 25 minutes off the bench.
Achor Achor continued his good run of form as well, grabbing a team-high 14 rebounds in a strong defensive performance.
“These guys did a tremendous job,” Hubbard said of his teammates. “All our threes, fours, fives: Achor, Shaun, Jamar, Quincy. They did a tremendous job of crashing off our threes, which we didn’t shoot great, but they helped us out tonight.”
The Bulldogs are rounding into form at the right time, shaking a 4-5 start to the season with a strong six-game winning run, but the real test has only just begun. They’re back on the road in the SEC at Kentucky on Saturday before welcoming No. 13 Alabama to The Hump next Tuesday.
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