The National Invitation Tournament Season Tip-Off returned to Brooklyn for another year of early season NCAA college basketball tournament Wednesday night at Barclays Center.
The odds-on favorite, No. 13 Baylor, and the most favored underdog to win the tournament, Florida, both advanced to the Finals of the four-team tourney, beating Oregon State and Pittsburgh respectively.
The final score of the first game was 88-72 between the Baylor Bears and the Oregon State Beavers. The Bears, who are anchored by freshman guard Ja’Kobe Walter fresh off of earning Big 12 Player of the Week honors, took control of the game right from tip off and never relinquished.
Baylor did not allow Oregon State to get an easy bucket, playing suffocating defense from beginning to end, forcing 14 turnovers, nine of them coming in the first half. Five minutes into the game, the score read 15-4 in favor of the Bears and the deficit never reached lower than 9 points throughout the entire game afterwards.
Baylor was able to get into the paint and score at will and draw defenders in to create open shots for their knockdown shooters. Oregon State was the complete opposite, with its interior defense unable to handle the size and athleticism of the opponent and their inability to effectively drive into the paint and get easy buckets.
Walter, who has been averaging 18.0 points per game going into the tournament and leading his team in scoring, lead both teams in points with 24, shooting an efficient 7-13 from the field and sinking all of his six free throws.
He actually didn’t put up his first points on the board until there was 5:43 left in the first half, and then proceeded to offensively take over, capping off the end of the half with an and-one three in the corner, hitting the one free throw to extend the lead for the Bears to 18 points going into the second half.
Baylor’s 7-foot freshman center, Yves Missi, put up his first career double-double with 14 points and 14 rebounds, letting his presence in the paint be known on both sides of the court and helping the Bears dominate the Beavers on Wednesday night, along with junior forward Jaylen Bridges, who also added 14 points and went 50% from three.
Oregon State’s leading scorer, sophomore guard Jordan Pope who was averaging 20.5 points per game, couldn’t get anything going offensively as he shot a poor 5-15 from the field, finishing with a quiet 13 points scored, airballing multiple times on highly contested desperate shot-clock expiring shots that kept deflating any momentum the Beavers rarely had in the game.
Senior guard Dexter Akanno actually led the team in scoring, erupting in the second half where he scored 14 of his 16 total points, but it was much too little, much too late.
Unfortunately for the Beavers, they move on to the consolation round whereas the Bears move on to the Finals where they will face the Florida Gators, who overcame an injury to sophomore center Micah Handlogten in the first minute of the game, to similarly defeat the Pittsburgh Panthers, 86-71, in a game that was actually much closer than the score suggests.
It was nip and tuck for the first 30 minutes, and Pittsburgh was the team who lead for almost the entirety of the first half as the deficit never grew larger than nine points with the Panthers keeping the slightest margin over the Gators.
Occasionally, the Gators would tie the game and then give up a score on the other end until junior guard Walter Clayton Jr., who drained six of his eight three point attempts and lead the entire tournament in scoring with 28 points on the night and had his fingerprints all over the game by adding five rebounds, two steals and a block, broke the deficit dam with a layup off of a steal and assist from sophomore guard Riley Kugel with only 35 seconds remaining in the first half to put them up by two.
The momentum completely shifted Florida’s way after freshman forward Thomas Haugh hit a buzzer-beater three to expand the lead to five points going into the half.
Grad-transfer forward Tyrese Samuel, who had a double-double with 20 points and 10 rebounds, shooting 9-11 from the field, all in the paint, with three blocks to boot, and the Florida bench, who scored a combined 28 points, helped guide the Gators to the NIT Season Tip-Off Finals.
The Panthers did storm back at the start of the second half and briefly held the lead for 27 seconds until the Gators took it right back and never let go for the rest of the game.
Four of the five Pittsburgh starters scored in the double digits but shot a combined 37.5% from the field and the bench did little to supplement them. When the game started to slip away in the last ten minutes, they didn’t have any answers offensively and shot themselves in the foot with several defensive lapses.
The leading scorer for the Panthers tonight, junior guard Ishmael Leggett, had 19 points and was one rebound shy of a double-double but went 7-20 from the field, mirroring the rest of his teammates.
It didn’t matter that the Panthers outrebounded the Gators 46-37 because they committed 14 turnovers and their two highest scorers going into the tournament, senior forward Blake Hinson and freshman guard Carlton Carrington, were inefficient shooting the ball.
The NIT Season Tip-Off concludes on Friday, November 24, at Barclays Center, starting at 3:00pm with the third-place game between Oregon State and Pittsburgh and finishing with the championship game at 5:30pm between No. 13 Baylor and Florida.
