Last year’s Sixth Man of the Year in West Coast Conference basketball has a sixth sense about his new team at UC Santa Barbara.
The second half of the season, Deuce Turner vows, will be better than the first.
So was the second half on Saturday when he came off the bench to score 18 of his 23 points and rally the Gauchos to an 83-66 victory at the Thunderdome.
“We know what we’ve got,” said Turner, a 6-foot-2 graduate transfer from the University of San Diego. “We also know that we’re a new team, and with that are going to be struggles, especially early on.
“But we’re all really confident, and we know that we’re going to come together and be much better come next month, and especially in March when it counts.”
The Gauchos (7-3) trailed by as many as 10 points before dominating Green Bay (2-10) in the second half to snap a two-game losing streak.
UCSB overcame a frigid start, having shot just 28.6% in the first half, to out-shoot the Phoenix for the game, 45.1% to 41.1%.
But most important, coach Joe Pasternack said, was the Gauchos’ 44-to-30 advantage in rebounding.
“We don’t talk about shooting, we talk about defense and rebounding,” he said. “We talk about what affects winning.
“Last week, we gave up 15 offensive rebounds (to UC San Diego). Today we gave up three offensive rebounds.
“It’s not complicated. It’s about hitting your man blocking out and not giving them more possessions than we get.”
Kenny Pohto, UCSB’s 6-11 center, helped out in that department with his third double-double of the season of 19 points and 10 rebounds. He reclaimed six of his teammates’ misses.
“We worked on it all week,” Pohto said. “Boxing out, that’s the biggest issue for us right now — we’ve been giving up too many offensive rebounds.
“We’ve got to be a lot better at that end, and I thought we did a really good job of that today.”
UCSB made its first four shots, three by Pohto, to take an 8-6 lead. He went 9-for-13 in the game.
“My team is doing a great job of finding me,” Pohto said. “Their tallest (starter) was something like 6-5, so it wasn’t that difficult.”
Stephan Swenson led the Gauchos with a season-high seven assists. Backup point guard Ben Shtolzberg added five assists in his 15 minutes of action.
The rest of the first half, however, was an offensive disaster for the Gauchos. They missed 16 of 17 shots through one stretch and were 0-for-8 from the three-point line until Max Murrell’s make with 8:16 to go in the first half.
Jeremiah Johnson roamed free like a mountain man through UCSB’s defense, scoring 11 of his team-high 18 points in the first nine-plus minutes to put the Phoenix ahead 19-11. His runner improved that margin to 29-19 with 4:11 left in the first half.
UCSB rallied, however, by forcing the Phoenix into five turnovers the rest of the period.
“They had 15 turnovers and we had nine, so that’s a really big part of it for us,” Turner said. “We know that any given night, we can make shots.
“Anybody can turn it up. Tonight it was me, and Kenny did a nice job in the paint.
“So that’s how you get through a slump, by playing hard on the other end.”
Turner and Swenson both made threes just before halftime to reduce the Gauchos’ deficit to 31-27.
Green Bay got its lead back into double-digits, 42-32, when Foster Wonders scored with 16:05 left.
But a basket by Jason Fontenet, who had missed all five of his shot attempts in the first half, ignited a 23-3 run that put the Gauchos ahead 57-45.
He scored all nine of his points in the second half and had a career-high 13 rebounds with four assists.
Fontenet also held Anthony Roy, the nation’s scoring leader with a 25.7-point average, to just 11 points on 3-of-9 shooting. An ankle injury sent Roy out of the game for good with 13 minutes to go.
“I thought Jason did an unbelievable job guarding him,” Pasternack said. “He was absolutely spectacular.
“He couldn’t make a shot but he had 13 rebounds, and that was a huge difference for us in the game.”
Turner, who scored 18 of his 23 points in the final 15:13, caught fire after a three by Isaiah Miranda got Green Bay to within 48-45 with 9:50 remaining.
Turner needed just 86 seconds to score the game’s next nine points. He capped it with a layup off his own steal to push UCSB’s lead up to 57-45. He was 7-for-11 from the floor in the second half and 9-for-15 in the game (3-for-7 from three) .
“Deuce played hard on defense — he really pressured the ball,” Pasternack said. “That’s what we’re talking about with him — playing really hard on defense.
“I’m not worried about his offense. He’s produced all his life.
“It’s about, ‘Can he sustain playing hard, competing hard at our standard?’”
Another question is can the Gauchos, 0-2 in Big West Conference play, keep winning when they resume league play against tougher competition in two weeks?
“Everybody else can write us off, but we’re not going to write ourselves off,” Turner said. “We played two tough teams, Davis and San Diego. They’re not going to be at the bottom of our league.
“We’ll be a lot better a month from now and two months from now whenever we play them. We’re going to keep refining ourselves.
“I think what we did tonight — especially in the second half — if we bring that energy, we can beat anybody in the league.”