by BOISE, Idaho – Eight minutes before midnight, Northern Arizona’s Cinderella run came to a close as the Montana State men’s basketball team won back-to-back Big Sky Conference Championship titles with an 85-78 win on Wednesday night.
Yet after the confetti fell on the Bobcats in Idaho Central Arena for the second time in less than a calendar year, after another jubilant celebration cutting the nets down, after Montana State head coach Danny Sprinkle took his seat at the postgame press conference, paused and said with a smile:
“That was awesome — I don’t even know what else to say. These guys took ownership of the program and bought in. Players make the plays in March, and these guys have been tremendous, especially with bullseyes on their backs all year after winning it last year.”
The win provided many firsts for Montana State men’s basketball: The first time MSU has won back-to-back Big Sky Championships, the first time MSU made the championship game in three-straight years and the first time the Bobcats have had consecutive 25-win seasons since 1927-29. With 52 wins in the last two years, Bobcat men’s basketball has reached unprecedented heights.
“It took everything,” Senior forward Jubrile Belo said of the season, which featured a difficult non-conference schedule, plenty of time on the road and taking everybody’s best shot in conference play. “We’ve been slaving away since June. Doing something that hasn’t been done here before is a feeling you can’t describe. Doing this with your best friends and an amazing coach who has told me this was going to come… seeing that come to life is mesmerizing.”
Even with the 2-seed, the Bobcats brought out every opponent’s best in Big Sky play — the title game was no exception. For a game pitting a team less than 24 hours removed from the Bobcats’ (25-9, 15-3 Big Sky Conference) double-overtime game against a Lumberjack team (12-23, 5-13 Big Sky Conference) playing its fourth game in five days, the 2023 Big Sky Championships was an uptempo affair. The ‘Jacks made things interesting down the stretch by chipping MSU’s double-digit lead down to five points with less than five minutes to play, but the Bobcats exploited NAU’s frontcourt and thin rotation in order to put them at arm’s length.
Led by 25 points from the Big Sky Tournament MVP RaeQuan Battle, the 2-seed Bobcats (25-9, 15-3 Big Sky Conference) never trailed against the 9-seed Lumberjacks, which finally ran out of gas after playing four games in five days. Fellow back-to-back champion Jubrile Belo finished with 14 points and four rebounds en route to earning All-Tournament team honors.
Additionally, the senior finished as MSU’s all-time leading scorer in the Big Sky Tournament with 122 points, passing Nate Holmstadt’s mark of 111 points from 1996-99.
“The four years Jubrile put in have been hard,” Sprinkle said. “When he came in, he believed when there wasn’t much in our program.”
“But he has that mindset to dominate every aspect of his life,” Sprinkle added. “He’s the most unselfish superstar in this league. To do the things he’s done while being all about his teammates, it’s unbelievable.”
For a game pitting a team less than 24 hours removed from a double-overtime game against a team playing its fourth game in five days, the 2023 Big Sky Championships was an uptempo affair. Unlike MSU’s low-scoring semifinal game, the Bobcats scored quickly by bolting out to a 6-0 lead. RaeQuan Battle finished an acrobatic reverse layup through traffic and completed the three-point play to put MSU up 9-2, yet two free throws and several empty possessions made it a 9-4 game at the first media timeout.
The Bobcat defense did a good job keeping Cone out of the scoring column until he nailed a three with 10:41 to play. Moments later, Cone drove into the lane, pivoted around and found Nik Mains for another three that made it a 21-18 game with 8:52 to go.
Playing with house money, one of the tournament’s hottest guards in Jalen Cone and experience flustering two slow-paced teams like Idaho and Montana over the past week, Northern Arizona was content with speeding up the game. Montana State, however, kept pace with seven points in a span of 49 seconds: first with Darius Brown II cruising in for a left-handed layup, then with Battle sprinting down an errant pass before skying in for a dunk, and then Tyler Patterson canning a three that put MSU up 31-22.
Yet NAU hung with the Bobcats. The Lumberjacks would pull within one possession two more times in the final five minutes of the first half. A 4-0 run in the final minute of the first half gave the Bobcats a 42-35 lead heading into halftime. In retrospect, that 7-0 burst gave MSU an invaluable cushion as the second half slowed down.
During the second half, Montana State’s league-leading defense and deliberate offense attempted to grind down NAU by getting to the free-throw line and causing four turnovers in the first three minutes. Save for a complete defensive breakdown on Cone — who had plenty of space for an open layup on the right side — the Bobcats flummoxed the Lumberjacks. MSU extended its lead to 10 off Osobor splitting a one-and-one, yet didn’t make its first field goal until Brown II found Caleb Fuller underneath at the 14:29 mark.
MSU’s lead wavered between seven and eleven points in the second half as the Bobcats threatened to break away from the Lumberjacks. But with every Bobcat basket, NAU cut the deficit to single digits with timely threes or three-point plays from their guards attacking the rim.
“They kept making threes,” Sprinkle said of NAU’s second-half offense. “To hold them to seven speaks to a tremendous effort from our guys. I wasn’t too worried about our leadership, but I was more worried about our stamina. Darius and Jubrile had been playing a lot of minutes lately, so I wanted to keep a close eye on that. But when it’s winning time and you’re playing for a championship, you have to play tired.”
But like MSU had done so often this season, it found a way to win.
Robert Ford III, one of the three transfers brought in over the offseason, capped off a personal 5-0 run with a backbreaking corner three with 2:08 to play. Then Brown II, who at has been automatic at the free-throw line all year, went 4-for-4 from the charity stripe when the Lumberjacks fouled to stay in the game. On one of NAU’s final possessions, Fuller skied up for an offensive rebound with several Lumberjacks around him, then got fouled with 10 seconds left to put the game on ice.
“There were times where we should’ve lost games, but we found out ways to win,” Battle said. “That’s one of the hardest things to maintain throughout the year.”
Carson Towt led the way for Northern Arizona with 16 points and nine rebounds, while Xavier Fuller chipped in 15 points, eight rebounds and three steals. Oakland Fort, who kickstarted NAU’s magical run with his buzzer-beating three against Eastern Washington, added 14 points off the bench.
MSU will find out its postseason fate on Selection Sunday, which takes place on March 12 at 4 p.m. MST on CBS. Right now, Bracket Matrix, a site aggregating dozens of bracket projections, has Montana State as a 15-seed. But with several conference tournaments yet to wrap up between now and March 12, the Bobcats could sneak up a seed line or two.
CONGRATULATIONS