UNM (4-3) defeated the NMSU Aggies 62-47 in the Lobos’ first game at the newly named WisePies arena, filled with 15,335 cheering Lobo (and a handful of Aggie) fans.
Junior College transfer and junior walk-on Tim Jacobs played his best game of his young Lobo career. He notched nine points on 4-7 shooting and had four assists. He made multiple plays down the stretch that don’t show up in the stat sheet, as well.
“That’s why we recruited him. Everybody can say what they want, that he’s a walk on — he’s not a walk on, he was recruited to play here,” head coach Craig Neal said. “He’s what New Mexico’s about.”
Freshman forward Joe Furstinger saw minimal minutes, but made the best of his short time on the court. He started the game with a monstrous dunk that got the Lobo faithful’s juices flowing. He added a 3-pointer minutes after and finished with five points.
“Joe’s going to be a good player,” Neal said. “Joe’s a lot farther along than we thought. Joe is a gamer; Joe is tough; Joe wants to be successful. Joe wants to be a player — Joe wants to be a Lobo.”
Senior guard Deshawn Delaney had his best game in a Lobo uniform as far as points go. He was aggressive from the start, scoring 10 of the Lobos’ first 21 points and finished with a career-high 22 points and seven rebounds.
Fellow senior guard Hugh Greenwood seemed to have climbed out of his shooting slump from last week. He went 0-11 in Sunday’s loss to USC, but bounced back and scored eight points, added three assists, five rebounds and four steals.
“We need Hugh,” Jacobs said. “He’s our senior leader and in practice he shoots the lights out, so when we get to the game we expect nothing less than that.”
Neal said he was pleased with his team’s performance, but they are still not where they need to be overall.
“Those rivalry games are tough. I just knew my guys would come out and play,” he said. “Let’s don’t get it out of hand: we’ve got a long way to go, and my job is to be a teacher, my job is to help my young team, and were going to continue to work.”
The Lobos had a season-high 17 bench points, which was kick-started by Jacobs and Furstinger.
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Aggie standout guard Daniel Mullings came into Wednesday’s contest averaging 13.9 points per game and the Lobos held him to 10 points, eight of which came in the first half.
Neal attributes much of Mullings’ struggle to the fact that UNM utilized a 2-3 zone against the Aggies (3-5) almost the entire game.
“We just took his dribble-drive away by playing zone,” he said. “When you do that, it’s hard to drive it.”
The Lobos’ next game will be on the road against Valparaiso on Saturday at 6:00 p.m.
Kyle Tomasi is a sports reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at sports@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @KyTo22.
