TCU puts clamps on Hawaii basketball on final day of DHC

HONOLULU — In the early stages of recovery from an Achilles injury, Juan Munoz had a front-row seat at this time last year when JoVon McClanahan’s deep 3-pointer against SMU touched off a wild celebration for Hawaii’s first Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic championship.

After UH limped to a fourth-place finish in the 2023 edition with a 65-51 loss to TCU on Sunday, Munoz thought the contrast was stark.

“Our goal was to come in here and repeat as champions, but I don’t think we deserved it,” the guard said. “I don’t think we played with the same fight, same grit that we had last year. But for we’re for sure going to get that back.”

TCU coach Jamie Dixon, a former UH assistant, gave the ‘Bows point guards no quarter, blitzing ball screens and forcing the orb out of the hands of McClanahan and Munoz.

In front of a sparse Christmas Eve afternoon crowd of a little more than 2,000, UH (8-4) saw its offense ground to a halt as it scored a season-low, shot a season-worst 33% from the field and committed a season-high 19 turnovers.

Besides Noel Coleman, who bounced back from a scoreless outing in a 73-68 loss to Georgia Tech on Friday night to score 19 points on 6-for-12 shooting, the Rainbow Warriors could establish little. UH had paint shots fall off the rim and some open looks at 3s go unfulfilled early, and that only seemed to compound errors as the game went.

“They did a great job defensively. They kind of iced the ball screens; it looked like a double team to try to get the ball out of our hands. Credit to them,” said Munoz, who scored nine points off the bench. “They came to play and we came out flat. Moving forward, that’s what we can’t do. We gotta have a hard, long look at ourselves in the mirror and get ready for conference.”

UH will rest for the next two days and reconvene on Wednesday in preparation for Saturday’s Big West opener against Cal State Fullerton.

“Disappointing,” UH coach Eran Ganot said. “Give TCU credit. Their effort and their defense obviously bothered us quite a bit. It was a slugfest for most of the game … eventually someone was going to separate and it was them.

“You grow from pain. This was painful.”

Coleman’s step-back 3 at the halftime buzzer brought UH within nine at the break. But UH would only get it to within single digits once in the second half, on a Ryan Rapp drive with five minutes left. TCU (10-2) immediately responded with an 8-0 run to ice it.

UH’s starting frontcourt of Bernardo da Silva, Justin McKoy and Matthue Cotton went a combined 1-for-15 from the field for four points.

McClanahan, UH’s floor leader who has a history of big games in the DHC, suffered an unknown ailment during the game, apparently in the first half and was lifted for good with 11:13 to play and UH down by 15. Ganot said he wasn’t sure what happened to him.

UH was so flummoxed trailing by 15 with a little over a minute left that it called a timeout it did not have, resulting in technical foul and two more points for the Frogs.

“You guys have never seen that since we’ve been here,” Ganot said. “We literally say how many timeouts we have all the time. But maybe that needed to be clearer. So, let’s put that on me for not communicating that effectively enough to the group.”

It was the kind of start-to-finish defensive performance that Dixon had been looking for with crop of experienced guards that were new to his roster. The Frogs didn’t miss frontcourt players Chuck O’Bannon and Essam Mostafa, who rested from ailments earlier in the tournament.

TCU, the national leader in fast-break points per game at over 25 entering the day, got out for only 10 in that category. Still, the Horned Frogs were exceptionally balanced; they didn’t have a double-figure scorer until Jameer Nelson Jr. finally broke the threshold in the final four minutes. All eight players who saw action recorded multiple field goals.

“It was an elite defensive performance for us,” said Dixon, who evened his record at 1-1 against the school he spent three seasons at in the 1990s. UH beat his Pittsburgh team in a stand-alone game on Maui in 2014.

“We wanted to win the tournament, but to get a road win in Hawaii, double digits, that’s going to count for something because I think they’re going to be really good,” Dixon said. “They have a really good feel for each other. They seem like a close-knit group.”

Coleman needs six more points to become the 17^th player to record 1,000 career points at UH. He already eclipsed 1,000 for his five-year college player, including his freshman season at San Diego.

There were a combined 2,608 people through the turnstiles, and 5,005 tickets issued, for the final two-game session that included several hundred people in attendance for the championship game between Nevada and Georgia Tech.

Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.