LONG BEACH \u2014 The Long Beach State men\u2019s basketball team made another late push but couldn\u2019t catch UC\u00a0San Diego in an 80-74 loss on Saturday night at the Pyramid.<\/p>\n
Freshman Gavin Sykes had 20 points to pace Long Beach (2-8 overall, 0-2 Big West Conference), while sophomore Petar Majstorovic added 18 (and six rebounds) as the underclassmen again paced LBSU in scoring. Rob Diaz III contributed 12 points and five assists.<\/p>\n
Aidan Burke had 18 points on 7-of-8 shooting (4 for 5 from 3-point range) to lead UCSD (8-1, 1-0). Leo Beath finished with 14 points and 11 rebounds, and Bol Dengdit also scored 14.<\/p>\n
Long Beach State started strong, with Majstorovic knocking down a 3-pointer followed by a lob to Shay Johnson Jr. that energized the crowd. The teams were tied at 17-all when the Tritons went on a 7-0 run to grab a lead with just over seven minutes to play in the first half, but Sykes and Long Beach cut into that margin and trailed just 34-30 at halftime.<\/p>\n
Long Beach started the second half with an 8-1 run, taking a 38-35 lead on a wide-open Isaiah Lewis 3-pointer that led to a UCSD timeout.<\/p>\n
Tied at 42, the Tritons scored on five consecutive possessions during an 11-0 run that made it 53-42 with 12:33 left. UCSD extended its lead to 14 points (66-52) with 7:33 left, but the hosts were able to chip away. LBSU cut the margin to four points on a Majstorovic 3-pointer with 18 seconds left, but the comeback ran out of time as UCSD sank four free throws to close out the game.<\/p>\n
Long Beach shot 46% from the field (29 for 63) and 9 for 28 from 3-point range (32%) but made 12 fewer free throws than the Tritons. UCSD shot 52% from the field 26 for 50) and 45% from behind the arc (9 for 20) while going 19 for 25 at the free-throw line.<\/p>\n
The teams matched each other with 32 rebounds and 34 points in the paint.<\/p>\n
UP NEXT<\/p>\n
LBSU resumes nonconference play next week with a Tuesday night game at San Jose State.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONG BEACH \u2014 The Long Beach State men\u2019s basketball team made another late push but couldn\u2019t catch UC\u00a0San…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[29668,4213,1327,131,133,132,26758,127],"class_list":["post-84772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-big-west-conference","tag-college-basketball","tag-college-sports","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-long-beach-state-sports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84772","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=84772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}