After an absence of athletic competition for more than eight months, Grand Canyon would savor the flavor of any game but winning Wednesday night's season opener at GCU Arena was like tasting victory for the first time all over again.
Beating Grambling State 69-53 gave head coach
Bryce Drew his first win at the helm of the Lopes and a first GCU victory for eight players.
The Drew era started with defense, which is where he wants team success to start. The Lopes held Grambling to 36.2% shooting from the field for a wire-to-wire victory that felt like a home-court environment even though the crowd was limited to band members, cheerleaders, dancers and 250 Havocs students who were spread out among a lower bowl filled with colorful cutouts.
"It's almost surreal walking out to be even playing a basketball game after all that's happened in the last eight to 10 months," Drew said. "The atmosphere was really good, though, as good as it could be under these conditions with all the cutouts we had, the game management. It's my first time experiencing it here and they're just phenomenal with what they do to put excitement around the court and around this basketball game."
The Lopes showed how much pent-up excitement they wanted to release in action, emerging with a 15-4 start over the first eight minutes.
While GCU center Asbjørn Midtgaard gathered a career-high 15 rebounds, sophomore point guard
Jovan Blacksher Jr. dominated both sides of the floor in an 11-point first half and senior power forward
Alessandro Lever added 14 of his game-high 18 points in the second half.
"We were sharing the ball," said Lever, who added eight rebounds to help the Lopes' 48-30 board advantage. "We tried to run the court a lot. Practice is hard. We just run, run, run up and down the court, offensively and defensively. By running the court like we did, we got a few open looks and easy baskets. That's what separated us a lot in transition offense from their team."
GCU will have more efficient offensive games but 14 fastbreak points helped the Lopes against Grambling, a pressing team coming off three consecutive seasons of 17 wins.
The Lopes shut out the Tigers for a stretch of 6:21 to take early command, as Blacksher poked and stripped the ball to send Grambling' off to a frustrating offensive night.
"I haven't been this excited for a game in a while," Blacksher said. "It was really exciting.
"I felt like we had to set a tone. (Assistant) coach (Jamall) Walker said, 'First impression is a key,' so I tried to do that."
If not for a goaltending call, the Lopes would have held the Tigers without a field goal for the first half's final six minutes too.
"We were really pleased with our defense," Drew said. "We put a lot of time in it over the summer and over the fall, really working on positioning and help side. It was nice to see the guys be able to reap some of the benefit of all that hard work and see that we can win games on the offensive end.
Grambling never threatened in the second half, when GCU junior
Gabe McGlothan's one-hand follow slam stuck an exclamation point on a Lopes run to a 45-32 lead with 12:48 to go.
Drew played a nine-man rotation for most of the first half, starting Blacksher, senior
Mikey Dixon, senior
Oscar Frayer, Lever and Midtgaard. McGlothan, senior
Sean Miller-Moore, junior
Dima Zdor and freshmen
Jayden Stone completed the mix until freshman
Liam Lloyd made it a 10-man rotation later.
"You just have to give everything you have on the court for as many minutes as Coach wants us to play," Lever said. "You come out, you get a little rest and, whenever you're ready, you can go back on the court. You can give more on the court."
When the game ended, the Lopes and Tigers circled with spacing at midcourt.
"We asked Grambling if they would join us so we could pray for their traveling," Drew said. "It's tough times, especially to be traveling. The virus. A lot of things. I thought it was awesome that they joined us."