February 7, 1999
L.B. St. hammers Cal Poly with ease
College basketball: Best first half in years leads to big victory.
By Gordon Verrell
Staff writer Long Beach Press Telegram
Long Beach State's men's basketball team battered Cal Poly SLO Saturday night, playing its best half of the season, maybe the best half in Wayne Morgan's 2 1/2 years as the 49ers' coach, but, even so, there remained an air of caution.
"We've won our last two games, but that's past," Mate Milisa said after the 49ers walloped Cal Poly, 94-80, in a Big West Conference game before an appreciative Pyramid crowd of 2,358.
"We can't get overconfident," Milisa added. "We still have a long road ahead of us."
True, but that road doesn't seem as perilous as it did just a week earlier, after the 49ers had lost two in a row.
Now, all of a sudden, they're back to within one-half game of first place in the Western Division.
"We were in first," reminded Ramel "Rock" Lloyd, "then we basically played ourselves out of first. We've got to stay focused and get back up there."
The 49ers were dead-aim focused in the opening half Saturday night, and for the first 2 1/2 minutes of the second half, when they took a rousing 30-point lead.
The 49ers closed the first half with a 7-0 run for a 19-point halftime lead, 50-31 - their highest-scoring half of the season. They came sprinting out of the blocks in the second half with an 11-0 explosion, altogether an 18-0 spree that jolted them in front, 61-31.
That focus got a little hazy, though, when Cal Poly, which shoots more 3-pointers than anyone in the conference, found the range suddenly and made things dicey, slashing the huge deficit to a mere 12 with 4:07 left. But that's as close as the Mustangs (9-12 overall, 4-6 in the Big West) could get.
The 49ers (10-11, 7-4) scored -- their most points in a Big West game under Morgan.
Antrone Lee played his finest game of the season --- a season-high 15 points, six assists, four blocked shots and two steals --- and he did a thorough job on Cal Poly's high-scoring Mike Wozniak (17.2), holding him to just five points in the first half.
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Lloyd scored 23, Milisa 19 and -Charles O'Neal 13.
The 49ers shot 57 percent (39-68), and a rousing 67 percent (22 for 33) in the first half. They also out-rebounded the Mustangs, 36-31.
"They out-played us, simple as that," said Cal Poly coach Jeff Schneider. "That (first half) was probably our poorest half, defensively, all season. They scored against our half-court offense, they scored against our zone, they scored against our man-to-man. And ... they shot 67 percent."