Fifth-year forward Jahmyl Telfort had 24 points in the loss to Marquette. Photo by Jonathan Wang.
CALEB DENORME | MANAGING EDITOR | cdenorme@butler.edu
The men’s basketball team dropped to 9-12 on the season and 2-8 in Big East play with a 78-69 home loss to No. 9 Marquette. The Bulldogs led by seven at halftime, but ultimately fell behind with a dismal second-half performance.
Fifth-year forward Jahmyl Telfort led the Dawg’s scoring charge with 24 points, followed by Patrick McCaffery who had 12. It was second-half shooting that sunk Butler, with the Bulldogs only hitting 25.8% of their shots from the field.
Let’s go beyond the box score as the Dawgs suffer their 12th loss of the season.
First half explosion
Butler came out of the locker room firing in the first half and built a seven-point lead at the break. The Dawgs shot a blistering 57.1% from the field and 40.7% from deep to put Marquette on its heels heading into the intermission.
A mix of interior scoring and a barrage of threes caught the No. 9 team in the nation by surprise, but the Golden Eagles fought to stay in the matchup. Marquette matched Butler’s pace by shooting 46.9% from the field and 50.8% from beyond the arc.
The bigger positive for the Bulldogs in the first half was their defense. Butler forced stops and even out-rebounded the Golden Eagles to limit Marquette’s second-chance points. The Dawgs held all of Marquette’s players to single digits in the scoring column in the first period as well.
Marquette head coach Shaka Smart found his team’s physicality “unacceptable” in the first half and urged them to step up in the second half.
“We just had to ramp up our level of violence,” Smart said. “I tell the guys all the time [that] if we don’t play with violence we are a very average team.”
Second half collapse
Although the Bulldogs started the game as strong as they could have, the second half could not have gone worse. Butler only scored 27 points after halftime and hit on eight out of its 31 shots. After one of the best offensive halves on the season, the Dawgs completely lost it after they came out of the locker room.
No Butler player scored more than 9 points and every Bulldog finished with a negative differential in the second half. Thad Matta accepted responsibility for the team’s poor performance, but he also recognized the reality of the terrible shooting half.
“We could not make a shot,” Matta said. “[Marquette] did a heck of a job defensively but we had some looks that were just in and out.”
Those missed looks turned a seven-point lead into a four-point deficit to make up just eight minutes into the second half. The Dawgs’ offense was floundering and the defense had become soft. Butler had no answers, and it did not find any until the final buzzer finally sounded.
“We had moments where we needed to get a stop [or] we needed a bucket and we just couldn’t,” Matta said. “I thought we competed, but when we needed things to happen we just weren’t able to make them happen tonight.”
Butler will hit the road to face Georgetown in Washington, D.C. on Friday, January 31.
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