WATERVILLE — This is one surefire way to tell that your college basketball team is an offensive juggernaut: You score 108 points, and off the top of his head, your coach isn’t sure if that’s a season high.
Colby did indeed reach a pinnacle with its 108-62 win Sunday over rival Bowdoin. The Mules, ranked 17th in the latest D3hoops.com poll, improved to 11-0, and it was the sixth game this season in which Colby has broken the 100-point mark. With the Mules averaging 96 points per game, 100 is less a barrier and more a goal at this point.
Colby’s 67-point output in the second half outscored the Polar Bears for the game. Coach Damien Strahorn hasn’t yet called his offense slump proof, but it’s certainly starting to look that way.
“That has a nice ring to it. I hope that holds true going forward,” Strahorn said. “It’s been fun to watch our guys grow together. We certainly have a number of guys who can make shots.”
The Mules made 19 of 36 3-pointers (52.7 percent). Seven players hit at least one 3-pointer, and each starter drained at least two. Leading scorer Sam Jefferson was held in check in the first half, scoring just four points. But with his teammates making shot after shot, the Polar Bears couldn’t focus on Jefferson the entire game. When his shots opened in the second half, Jefferson hit them and finished with 22 points, not far off his average of 24.7 per game.
Alex Dorion was 6 of 9 from 3-point range and scored 23 points. Matt Hanna made four 3-pointers. Will King and Noah Tyson each sank a pair. As Bowdoin learned, slowing down Jefferson doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll slow down the Mules.
“They try to run us off the 3-point line, try to face guard me and get other people involved. It hasn’t really mattered. We’ve been able to adapt and adjust,” Jefferson said. “Anything anybody tries to do, we’ve been able to counter so far. It feels pretty good to see the work we put in all last summer pay off.
“In a game like this, when they come out in the first three quarters of the game and try to face guard me and take me out of it, I’m not getting shot attempts. But you can see every action that I’m in, the next pass is going to be open.”
The next pass. That’s as big a piece of Colby’s offense as the ability of so many players to knock down shots. Colby had 28 assists Sunday, putting the Mules back in the national lead in assists per game. When everybody can shoot, the trust to make the extra pass is always there.
“What I’ve loved this year is how well we pass and share the ball. It becomes pretty tough to guard when you can space the floor that way. I thought Bowdoin did a great job in the first half guarding Sam. He only had two field-goal attempts through the first half,” Strahorn said.
Colby played without starting guard Wallace Tucker, who suffered a sprained ankle in Friday’s 79-59 win at Maine Maritime. Wallace averages just over 11 points per game and will be out a couple weeks, Strahorn said, but Dorion stepped into the starting lineup and the Mules never slowed down.
“We’ve always sort of been that way. We work on it. We certainly try to focus our recruiting with a skill level in mind. We want guys to play aggressively, play confidently,” Strahorn said. “There hasn’t been too many times we’ve had to talk about somebody taking a shot that we didn’t like.”
The Mules started to see this offensive development last season, when they averaged just under 85 points per game, second-best in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. This season, Colby knows it’s going to score and dares teams to try to keep up. Bowdoin did early, only trailing 23-22 with 8:40 left in the first half. Then the Mules went on a run, pushed the lead to 41-31 by halftime, and turned the game into a runaway in the second half.
“Going into last year, we knew we could be good. We put in new offensive principles. Coming into this year, with a full year under our belt and the same core group of guys, we all have the green light,” Jefferson said.
The Mules had a nearly three-minute scoring drought around the midpoint of the first half, then a cold spell that lasted just over two minutes early in the second. Opponents must take advantage of these, because they don’t happen often and do not last long.
That brief scoring slump in the second half ended when Hanna hit a 3. Thirty-nine seconds later, Dorion made a 3-pointer. Thirty-seven seconds after that, Hanna hit another.
At that point, with just over 16 minutes left in the game, Colby’s lead was 53-40, and the Mules were just getting warmed up.
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