Denver 66, Cal State Northridge 63

In front of their largest home crowd since Joe Scott’s very first game as head coach in 2007, the Denver Pioneers (2-6) edged Cal State Northridge (2-6) on Saturday, 66-63, to earn their much-needed second win of the season before heading into a brutal stretch against two WCC powers.

“You know, we’re not the most confident bunch in the world right now, but what we did today…is what makes you build some confidence,” Coach Scott said afterward. The Pioneers, he said, did “what we needed to do to win that game. … We’re playing better, and it’s good to get a win. I’m happy for our guys; everybody’s happy.”

The unusually large crowd for a DU basketball game — drawn in part by a promotion that saw hundreds of local elementary school students given free tickets and honored on the court at halftime — witnessed an ugly, foul-plagued victory for Denver. A total of 63 fouls were called, and 83 free throws were attempted (45 by Denver, 38 by Northridge). After the game, Scott expressed frustration about what he described as an artificial balancing of those foul-call numbers: “The way teams play us, they almost foul on every play. … That’s what everybody’s doing. They just want to foul, foul, foul. What I don’t like about it is, just because they’re foul, foul, fouling down there, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re foul, foul, fouling down at the other end.”

But in any case, despite the referees’ best efforts, the game produced a fairly dramatic ending for those who stuck around until the end of the nearly 2 1/2 hour contest.

After the Pioneers had let two separate nine-point leads — one with 5:54 left and one with 3:17 left — slip away, largely due to inconsistent free-throw shooting down the stretch (more on that later), the Matadors were within 64-60 with 22 seconds left, with the ball. Northridge struggled for more than 10 seconds to get off a good shot, until finally Raymond Cody let fly a desperation, just-trying-to-draw-the-foul attempt from beyond the three-point arc with 8.5 seconds left.

He didn’t draw the foul, but impossibly, the shot went in, and suddenly it was a one-point game, 64-63 Pioneers.

Denver’s Travis Hallam was fouled promptly off the inbounds with 6.8 seconds left. He made the first free throw to increase DU’s lead to 2, but missed the second. However, in perhaps the play of the game, Trevor Noonan grabbed the offensive rebound. He was fouled with 4.5 ticks to go, and given a chance to ice the game at the line.

Like Hallam had done, Noonan hit the first foul shot, then missed the second, giving Denver only a 3-point lead instead of 4. But although it was a one-possession game, the Pioneers weren’t going to give the Matadors a chance to tie it with another highlight-reel #superhoop. Instead, after Northridge advanced the ball quickly up the court, Travis Hallam, on Coach Scott’s instructions, committed a deliberate foul with 1.8 seconds left, before Northridge could get off a shot.

As basketball-savvy observers know, by deciding to send Northridge to the line, Coach Scott was choosing sides in one of the most hotly debated topics in basketball: up three points with just a few seconds left, do you foul?

“I’m in the [foul] camp,” Scott told me after the game. “I’ve seen too many 48-footers, 27-footers. You saw the one that went in” on the previous possession — i.e., the circus shot by Cody with 8.5 left. “I’ve just seen too many ESPN highlights [of three-point shots] that send the game into overtime. I haven’t seen too many ESPN highlights where they make their first [free throw], miss their second, get the rebound and score.”

The fouling strategy worked, as statistics show it almost always does (roughly 95 percent of the time, versus ~80 percent of the time not fouling). The fouled Northridge player, Aqeel Quinn, missed both free throws, and the Matadors never got off a shot after the rebound of his second miss. Game over.

Afterward, amid his happiness and relief about the win, Scott expressed frustration about the Pioneers’ra inability to put the game away after taking those two nine-point leads. The team did a better job, Scott said, of “playing a 40-minute game” and building those leads late, but “now as you build those nine-point leads, you’ve got to learn…how to keep it at nine and make it grow, and one thing is to make your foul shots.”

At one point Saturday, I tweeted: “DU up 6 with the ball, 5:59 left. Do the Pioneers know how to close out a close game?” Moments later, a Kyle Lewis three-pointer gave them their first 9-point lead. But then the Matadors began chipping away, leaving the answer to my question somewhat ambiguous.

Ten times after Lewis’s three, the Pioneers went to the line for two free throws. Only three of those times did they hit both shots (in all cases, the shooter was freshman Chris Udofia). The other seven times, they hit 1 of 2 (Udofia twice, others 5 times). Obviously, those 7 unscored points could have made the game a lot less suspenseful in the closing seconds.

Nevertheless, the win was a huge relief for Denver, which was staring down a possible 1-9 start if they had lost, what with a game at St. Mary’s and a home date with Portland — ranked #1 and #24, respectively, among mid-majors by The Mid-Majority — looming in the next few days.

Noting the Matadors’ key shots down the stretch, in particular the circus-style #superhoop, to keep the game close, Scott said, “I’m proud of our guys for handling all of that adversity and doing what was critically important, which is win the game.” He added: “We’ve been practicing better, we’ve been playing better. That being said, what’s critical is you have something to show for it. That’s why today’s game was big for us.”

Attendance in the 7,200-seat Magness Arena was announced at 5,450 — a level virtually unheard-of for a basketball game (as opposed to DU hockey games, which routinely draw larger crowds). And unlike some well-attended games, such as this season’s previous high-attendance game against Colorado State (4,851), the crowd Saturday was almost exclusively pro-DU. As a result, while it might be an exaggeration to call the atmosphere electric, it was certainly livelier than a typical Pioneers game — especially in the first half. (The slow pace of the game, the conclusion of the halftime festivities, and perhaps the approach of bedtime for the elementary-school set did conspire to reduce the crowd substantially by the end.)

In any case, the only other games during Scott’s tenure at which DU drew more than 5,000 fans to a basketball game were his very first two games, against Wyoming and Colorado in 2007, which had attendance figures of 5,667 and 5,035, respectively. The following year’s highest-attended game was as Colorado State, 3,692; last season, it was Florida Atlantic, 4,117.

(Attendance stats were compiled by yours truly, game by game, from the box sores at BB State and, on a few occasions where the attendance number wasn’t listed there, ESPN.)