For the first time this season, the Hawaii men\u2019s basketball team is alone at the top.<\/p>\n
Remaining there will be the real trick.<\/p>\n
The Rainbow Warriors, fresh off an 89-74 win at Cal State Bakersfield on Thursday night, drove the roughly 100 miles to Northridge, Calif., site of Saturday\u2019s matchup with Cal State Northridge at Premier America Credit Union Arena.<\/p>\n
After five \u2018Bows scored in double figures to help repel a series of second-half Roadrunner runs at the Icardo Center, coach Eran Ganot told Spectrum News in a phone interview that the team is not impressed with its standing with seven games to play in the Big West regular season.<\/p>\n
UC Irvine has matched UH near the top of the standings for weeks, but the Anteaters stumbled at Cal Poly on Thursday, 79-73.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s an eternity to make some moves,\u201d Ganot said, \u201cbut there’s been a bit of a mosh pit in our league standing so I think there’s going to be a lot of battles, close games.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don’t scoreboard watch so much as just understand \u2026 we\u2019re humbled by where we put ourselves in, but we know we have a ways to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
UH (18-5, 10-3 Big West) is aiming for its first conference road sweep in four trips. CSUN (15-10, 8-5) hasn\u2019t lost since it traveled to Honolulu and lost by 21 on Jan. 24. Tipoff at Premier America Credit Union Arena is 3 p.m. Hawaii time.<\/p>\n
The Matadors, who had a bye on Thursday, have had extra time to prepare for UH.<\/p>\n
\u201cA program that we have a lot of respect for, plays really hard, has some really good talent, a coach (Andy Newman) I have a lot of respect for and who’s had a week to prepare for us and a tough place to play,\u201d Ganot said. \u201cA lot of challenging obstacles for us, and on a quick turnaround.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dre Bullock led UH with 19 points at struggling CSUB (8-18, 2-12), which lost its ninth straight to plummet to the Big West basement. Harry Rouhliadeff and Isaac Johnson added 17 points, Gytis Nemeiksa scored 12 off the bench and Isaac Finlinson put in 10.<\/p>\n
With a mind toward Saturday\u2019s game, Ganot managed to keep everyone in the lineup below 33 minutes played despite going with a seven-man rotation, plus spot minutes for wing AJ Economou. Backup center Yacine Toumi was available but did not play.<\/p>\n
Hunter Erickson had eight points, six rebounds, four assists, two steals and one turnover in his sixth game as the team\u2019s acting starting point guard since Aaron Hunkin-Claytor went down with a season-ending foot injury.<\/p>\n
The Roadrunners were held to 1-for-12 shooting from long range by UH, a top-five team in 3-point field-goal percentage allowed.<\/p>\n
With a win at UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara (17-8, 10-4) slid into second ahead of next Saturday\u2019s showdown with UH in Honolulu, \u201cAC Carter Night\u201d as UH will retire the jersey of the former great.<\/p>\n
Brian McInnis<\/a>\u00a0covers the state\u2019s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii.\u00a0He can be reached at\u00a0brian.mcinnis@<\/a>charter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time this season, the Hawaii men\u2019s basketball team is alone at the top. Remaining there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[19375,6632,6631,151,153,152,19376,1815,2289,127,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-177335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bakersfield","8":"tag-app-college-sports","9":"tag-app-sports","10":"tag-app-top-stories","11":"tag-bakersfield","12":"tag-bakersfield-headlines","13":"tag-bakersfield-news","14":"tag-brian-mcinnis","15":"tag-college","16":"tag-hawaii","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}