BOISE, Idaho – Day-by-day, as conference tournaments advance and brackets shrink, games are increasingly decided by small margins.
So it was on Tuesday between Montana and Northern Arizona, two equally-matched teams with identical run-and-gun philosophies.
The two split wins in the regular season, with the Lady Griz winning in Flagstaff and the Lumberjacks reciprocating in Missoula.
In a tense fourth quarter on Tuesday, Montana cut Northern Arizona’s lead to one possession multiple times. Every time, the Lumberjacks had an answer, eventually getting some breathing room with a 6-0 run and seeing out a 74-67 win.
“We just couldn’t quite get over the edge,” Lady Griz head coach Brian Holsinger said. “But you gotta give them credit. They found ways. Their experience in these moments probably mattered. They found ways to make a couple of buckets here and there. And we didn’t get stops. I mean, it’s basketball.”
The result sends Loree Payne back to a familiar place – the Big Sky title game. Each of the past three seasons, Payne has navigated the Lumberjacks through the bracket to the championship, 40 minutes away from the NCAA Tournament. Each time, NAU has lost – two years ago to the Darian White-Kola Bad Bear juggernaut at Montana State, last year to the unique, unsolvable problem of Kahlaijah Dean at Sacramento State.
“When I took over this program seven years ago, the main goal was to be a championship contender,” Payne said. “I feel like we’ve established ourselves as that, as a basketball program that, in any given year, could win the title. It’s been disappointing the last two years, obviously, getting so close, and a lot of the players that we have sitting in that locker room have experienced that. The last few years at the end, it’s like, hey, we have unfinished business, you know, we have work to do.”
This year poses just as difficult a challenge, as the Lumberjacks play No. 1 Eastern Washington and conference MVP Jamie Loera on Wednesday afternoon for the right to go to March Madness.
So far in Boise, Loera has controlled the Eagles to back-to-back wins, driving to the rim and floating inch-perfect kickout and skip passes to EWU’s army of shooters with the touch of prime Dan Marino.
“Eastern’s a really good team. they’re incredibly talented,” Payne said. “They have experience as well. I think it’s gonna be a back-and-forth battle. We beat them in Flagstaff and we had a pretty good lead and then they fought themselves back in it. Over there, they kind of kicked our butts (67-42), so I think that’s the memory right now in our minds. We’re very excited to have an opportunity to go at it again for a third time.”
It’s a testament to Payne’s work in Flagstaff that, six seasons after going 7-23 in her first year with the Lumberjacks, the conference tournament title is the only honor she has left to win. In that time, Payne has steadily built a contender, proving that she can develop all-conference talent and that her frenetic pace works in the Big Sky.
This year’s NAU team is built around a rising star: precocious sophomore post Sophie Glancey. After dropping 30 on the Lady Griz in Missoula earlier in the season, she had 21 points and 11 rebounds on Tuesday in her hometown of Boise, including an unexpected bank 3 from the the top of the key that prompted an apologetic Jordan-esque shrug as she ran back up-court.
Besides Glancey, this year’s Lumberjacks have maintained Payne’s favored fast-paced ethos, driven this year by the swaggering Moran twins, Olivia and Nyah, and former Montana State point guard Grace Beasley. On Tuesday, Beasley dropped an increasingly audacious series of floating hit-ahead passes into the hands of her fellow former Bobcat Leia Beattie, finishing with a preposterous 60-footer during the run that put the game away for NAU.
“I definitely do think a lot of responsibility is on the point guard pushing and kind of setting the tempo for the game,” Beasley said. “I thought we did a great job today. It’s not just me, it’s the wings sprinting, looking back for the ball.
“Knowing that they played yesterday, I think that was a big key coming into today, just pushing the ball, pushing the tempo and hopefully knowing that we could outrun them in the fourth quarter.”
On the other side of the court, Holsinger and the Lady Griz are trying to trace the steps that Payne and her program have laboriously climbed over the majority of the last decade.
But the part of the challenge that’s different is Payne has led NAU to two of its five 20-win seasons ever and is searching for NAU’s second-ever berth in the NCAA Tournament. Meanwhile, Holsinger is guiding a program that has 21 NCAA Tournaments to its credit, but none since 2015.
It’s an irony that wouldn’t be lost on Payne, who grew up on the Montana Hi-Line during the near-40-year period when everybody else in the Big Sky was trying to replicate what Robin Selvig was accomplishing in Missoula, that the Lady Griz are now chasing her record of steady progress.
Holsinger’s third year with Montana ended with plenty of milestones, including his first conference tournament win – a mark that Payne achieved in her second season – and a first appearance in the semifinals, which matches the three seasons it took her to get there.
Along the way, the Lady Griz settled on an identity, increasingly playing two point guards in Mack Konig and Gina Marxen, spreading the floor and taking – and making – a gluttonous amount of 3-pointers.
That wasn’t quite enough on Tuesday. But if Holsinger is truly just a couple steps behind Payne’s trajectory, even better times are coming – and future matchups between the two might be decided – by even smaller margins.
