Idaho already gave Connor Hill his own T-shirt giveaway night, but after his performance against Portland State Thursday, the school might want to give him his own bobble head.
After he went into the second half with just eight points and his team down two, the senior from Post Falls, Idaho, found his shot in the second half as he didn’t miss any of his six 3-point attempts.
Hill finished with a team high 28 points and led the Vandals to an 87-76 victory over the Vikings.
“If I make three, four or five in a row, I kind of want to shoot another one,” Hill said. “I think some of them are maybe not great shots, so I need to be careful of that, but if I make a few in a row, I’m looking to shoot it again because I got the flame.”
Hill might have made the shots, but he gave credit to his teammates for finding him when he was open.
“I don’t know what it was, but I feel like my teammates were very unselfish tonight,” Hill said. “Finding me off screens and just looking for me, so that was great.”
With the victory, Idaho improved to 10-12 overall and 5-6 in conference competition. The win also jumped the Vandals two spots in the standings from eighth to sixth place.
Thanks to a loss at Eastern Washington, Sacramento State now comes to Moscow Saturday as the conference’s second-best team.
Conference standings didn’t come up in the Vandals’ locker room when they trailed by two at half, Idaho coach Don Verlin said.
The Vandals held a 12-point lead early in the first half, but Portland State battled back with eight first-half 3-pointers.
“It was an important game because they were ahead of us in the standings,” Hill said. “They came all the way back and were up two at half, which was kind of surprising because we let another lead slip … We did a good job after half, just coming out and making a run and getting stops on (defense). It was a good team win for us.”
Verlin said the team talks about what they need to do better, and in this case, it was keeping up the tempo and playing better defense. The Vandals opened the second half with a 12-4 run and never trailed again.
“We felt like they were gasping for air a little bit,” Verlin said. “We wanted to keep the pressure on them best we could. They were trying to pressure us, we were trying to attack their press.”
The Vandals have struggled to hold leads late in games this season and a big reason for that is missed free throws. Against Portland State, Idaho went 16-of-19 from the charity stripe.
“There’s a lot of basketball to be played, we got seen more games,” Verlin said. “What we gotta do is take one game at a time, one opponent at a time and if we take care of what we’re suppose to do, we’ll be fine.”
Korbin McDonald can be reached at [email protected]