ROLLA, Mo. – For the first time since 2014, Missouri S&T's men's basketball team will get an opportunity to play in the Great Lakes Valley Conference Tournament and will look to pick up its second win of the year over its first round foe, as the Miners will face Truman State Sunday in a 3 p.m. contest in Kirksville, Mo.
The Miners beat the sixth-seeded Bulldogs in a high scoring affair on Jan. 28 by a count of 96-91 and will try to pull off another win at Pershing Arena in order to reach the conference quarterfinals for the first time since becoming a member of the GLVC prior to the 2005-06 season.
S&T comes into Sunday's contest fresh off a 77-62 win over Drury Thursday, as the Miners outscored the Panthers 44-29 in the second half to improve to 12-13 overall and 6-12 in the GLVC.
Randy Holmes (St. Louis, MO/Soldan International Studies) led the Miners with 20 points in the win, while
Jalen Myers (Shorewood, IL/Minooka) ended up with 18 and
Rokas Paulauskas (Talsiai, Lithuania/Hamilton Heights Acad.) recorded his seventh double-double of the year with 10 points and 13 rebounds.
Myers leads a four-player contingent in double figures for the season with an average of 14.7 points a game and has connected on 70 three-pointers, the most by a Miner in over a decade. Holmes is scoring 12.8 points per contest, while
Telloy Simon (Kitchener, Ont./St. Mary's) is averaging 11.7 a game and
Juwan Miller (Kitchener, Ont./Huron Heights), who ranks among the GLVC leaders in steals and assists, is scoring 10.8 per game.
Miller ranks third in the conference in assists with 136 and in steals with 52; his assist total this season is the second-best mark in school history. Paulauskas leads the GLVC in offensive rebounds with 3.3 per game and ranks sixth overall with a team-best 7.8 per contest, while
Ervin Sarajlic (St. Louis, Mo./Oakville) ranks in third in the conference in three-point shooting at 51.1 percent.
The Miners had five players in double figures in the win over Truman last month, led by Simon's 22 points.
ABOUT TRUMAN STATE: The Bulldogs enter Sunday's opening round game with a 20-8 overall record and finished 12-6 in the GLVC following a 97-92 home loss Thursday to Quincy. Truman had six players in double figures -- led by Kyle Kanaskie's 19 points -- and shot 54.5 percent from the field, but Quincy made 64.8 percent of its shots in route to winning the outright GLVC West Division title.
Jake Velky, who had 24 points in the first meeting with S&T in January, leads Truman with an average of 16.3 points per game which ranks 10th in the conference. Velky also ranks second in the league in three-pointers made with 85, seven of them coming in the earlier game with the Miners and has made them at a clip of 46.4 percent, 11th in Division II.
Truman has the league's top three-point shooter in Kanaskie, who has connected on 52.9 percent of his long-range tries this season, while Cory Myers, a 13.9 points per game scorer, has hit 43.9 percent of his attempts from beyond the arc and also ranks fourth in the GLVC with 52 steals. As a team, Truman is fourth in Division II in three-point shooting at 42.8 percent; the Bulldogs led the nation in that category when the teams met in January.
Connor Erickson is also averaging 12.6 points a game and is the Bulldogs' top rebounder with 6.8 a game, while Myers has 131 assists and Dwight Sistrunk has recorded 123.
Truman State was ranked seventh in last week's NCAA Division II Midwest regional rankings as one of five GLVC teams among the top 10.
