Arizona State Sun Devils Beat Northern Colorado Bears 90-63 Behind Paulius Murauskas’ 33 Points

TEMPE — It was close for about half of the first half, and then it wasn’t. The Arizona State Sun Devils (2-0) were tied 10-10 with the Northern Colorado Bears (1-1) early and led just 16-12 midway through the first half Friday night, before the run came and turned the game into a blowout — a 90-63 win at Desert Financial Arena in the second game of the Randy Bennett era.

Paulius Murauskas is why it broke open. He scored a game-high 33 points on 13-of-18 shooting, including 2-of-3 from three, with five rebounds — 18 of those points in the first half, most of them in the paint, where Arizona State outscored Northern Colorado 48-32 on the night. When a defense has to collapse on a big man scoring that efficiently inside, the whole floor opens, and that’s the story of this game: Northern Colorado had no answer in the middle, so everything else came easy.

The other half of the break was Bryce Ford off the bench. Ford entered early in the first half and scored 12 of his 17 points before halftime, on 5-of-7 shooting with back-to-back threes in the stretch that pushed a four-point lead to 14. Arizona State led 48-26 at the half and by as many as 30 in the second half, and the game never tightened back up.

That’s a different win from Monday’s opener, when Murauskas and Joel Foxwell carried the load against East Tennessee State. This time the scoring spread: Ford had 17, Dillan Shaw had eight points with a game-high 12 rebounds, two steals and two blocks, JRob Croy had eight, and Filip Malesevic gave the Sun Devils six points and 11 rebounds off the bench. Foxwell ran it cleanly — seven points, eight assists and no turnovers.

The team numbers show a game controlled in every area except one. Arizona State shot 53.8 percent (35-of-65) to Northern Colorado’s 42.9 percent (24-of-56), won the rebounds 39-21, the assists 16-13, the steals 8-1 and the blocks 4-0, and turned it over only five times to the Bears’ 11. Northern Colorado actually shot the three better — 44.4 percent (8-of-18) to 31.8 percent (7-of-22) — and still lost by 27, because the Bears shot 43.8 percent at the free-throw line (7-of-16) to Arizona State’s 68.4 percent (13-of-19) and couldn’t score inside. Manning Shareef led the Bears with 13 points off the bench, and Hunter Caldwell added 11.

Arizona State stays home to host the Hofstra Pride on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m. MST at Desert Financial Arena, on ESPN+.

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