By Tim Heiduk
January 18, 2020
 
(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) The #4 Westmont men's basketball team (17-2 overall, 6-1 GSAC) looked set to finally exorcise its demons against #7 The Master's (15-3, 5-2), but a contested layup with just 1.6 seconds left gave the visiting Mustangs a dramatic win, 70-69, in front of a capacity crowd inside Murchison Gymnasium on Saturday night.
 
"It was a great college basketball game," Westmont head coach John Moore said. "I liked the way we played for the majority of the game. You get one more stop and you're feeling a lot better about things, but I'm really proud of the guys. I tried to encourage them to keep their heads up when we spoke after the game. There were so many positives from this."
 
Westmont's loss to The Master's, the back-to-back GSAC regular season and tournament champions, is the Warriors' eighth straight loss against the Mustangs despite holding an all-time 63-20 advantage.
 
"We're so much better than we have been against them in the past," Moore said. "In our recent losses, they led the whole game. This game, we led the majority of the game.
 
"I thought their coach Kelvin Starr showed a lot of class at the end. He said, 'That celebration you saw out of my team and out of me shows the amount of respect we have for your program.' I thought that was an indication of that. I thought the way they were celebrating told you that wasn't a game against a team they thought they should've won by a bigger margin. They felt they were very fortunate to win the game."
 
It looked like Westmont was going to win the game after Hunter Sipe's corner triple with 8.7 seconds left put the Warriors up by one. But the Mustangs had different ideas.
 
The Master's crossed half court and called a timeout, setting up the play that ultimately won them the game and gave the Warriors their first GSAC loss of the season.
 
"For the most part, we contained a very good team that's used to scoring a lot more points than they scored tonight, but we just couldn't get the last stop," Moore said.
 
Westmont began the game strongly, hitting eight 3-pointers in the first half to take a 38-30 lead into the locker room. Moore credited assistant coach Landon Boucher for his game plan that keyed the Warriors' fast start to the game.
 
"I really loved our mindset coming into today and I thought Landon Boucher put together a superb game plan" Moore said. "Our shoot-around was outstanding. Our mentality to start the game was excellent.
 
"We were shooting well from 3-point range. I thought we were executing well and did an excellent job of spreading the floor, forcing them to guard us in different places than they're accustomed to."
 
The beginning of the second half was delayed due to a shot clock malfunction, but that didn't slow down the Warriors, who scored the first four points of the second half to take a game-high lead of 12.
 
Westmont's advantage was reduced to just five, but the Warriors restored their double-digit lead soon thereafter.
 
Yet the Mustangs charged back again, this time taking their first lead of the game with 3:53 to play, converting two free throws after Justin Bessard committed his fifth personal foul. Tristan Lloyd subbed in for Bessard with four fouls himself, before he also fouled out with 1:47 left, forcing Westmont into a small ball lineup for the remainder of the game.
 
The Warriors seemed to get off the hook with Gyse Hulsebosch's miraculous, game-tying 3-pointer with under a minute to play and Sipe's go-ahead triple from the corner. But the Warriors' lack of size down the stretch proved costly, as the team lacked a true interior presence defensively on the Mustangs' game-winning layup. Yet Moore believed the team also benefitted from playing with a smaller lineup.
 
"You're playing with a much smaller team, but it also allows you to put a guy like Gyse (Hulsebosch) in to make the shot he made to tie the game," Moore said. "It forces (Tim) Soares to have to guard someone from the 3-point line, so we kick it out to Hunter (Sipe), who I think Soares was guarding, who's wide open and buries a big three to put us up by one.
 
"For every drawback, there can be some benefits and we found some benefits tonight. It was really unfortunate because I thought Justin Bessard started out well, but just the fouls got in the way."
 
In the second half, the Mustangs outscored the Warriors by nine points, including a crucial 7-0 run in an almost five-minute stretch from 6:12 to 1:27 on the clock.
 
"They got some offensive boards where it felt like we got a stop, but they'd come up with it," Moore said. "After a loss, there's a lot of learning that will take place, especially from that stretch where we had some sequences where we weren't able to score. We didn't execute and we took some bad shots.
 
"But they're a very good team. There's a reason they're still a top-10 team. I thought we were equally as good as they were tonight. It just came down to that last possession."
 
Cade Roth led the Warriors with his 18 points, while Abram Carrasco (15 points) and Jared Brown (12 points) also reached double figures.
 
Westmont returns to Murchison Gym on Thursday against #18 Hope International at 7:30 p.m. The Warriors play six of their next seven games at home.
 
Despite the loss, Westmont remains in first place atop the conference standings, one game ahead of a three-way tie for second place between #7 The Master's, #23 Arizona Christian and William Jessup.
 
"We're a team that's hungry," Moore said. "We're no longer the team that's doing a lot of hunting. We're the team that has a bullseye on our back and we're the team that's being hunted."