Long Beach State opens season with win over Hawaii-Pacific

In the words of Long Beach State head coach Dan Monson, it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even good.

But it was good enough.

The LBSU men’s basketball team showed the kind of issues to be expected from a team with three new starters in its season opener, but the 49ers went on to defeat Hawaii-Pacific 71-59 Saturday in the homecoming game at the Walter Pyramid.

“I tried to remind our guys after the game,” Monson said, “we beat [North] Alabama on the same day, same game last year, 75-65, and we still won the league. There’s a long way to go; it’s a process, and obviously this is just the beginning of that process.”

The LBSU 49ers looked a lot like the Mike Caffey 49ers for most of the game. Caffey hit everything: layups, 3-pointers, mid-range jumpers and even a dunk on his way to 16 points in the first half.

Caffey’s dunk was a welcomed surprise for 49er fans about six minutes in. Caffey got ahold of the ball on a fast break, and the six-foot-tall point guard threw it down the basket to give LBSU (1-0) a 16-6 lead and ignite the Pyramid.

“I’ve doing it since my freshman year, but just in confidence,” Caffey said. “I wasn’t that confident in my legs, so I didn’t want to go out there and embarrass myself. I’ve been working on my legs a little more this summer, and I feel more confident on fast breaks.”

As much as the dunk looked like it would become a momentum-buidling moment for The Beach, the 49ers couldn’t pull away from the Division-II Sea Warriors. Monson attributed the lack of dominance to “everybody trying to hit the next home run.”

“You had such a great crowd … everybody’s trying to make a spectacular play instead of just doing their jobs,” Monson said. “That’s what new teams do. We got into that a little bit, and all of a sudden, it’s a whole new ballgame.”

The 49ers went into halftime up just eight points after leading HPU 22-6 earlier in the game.

Coming out of the break, LBSU kept a steady cushion of about ten points but failed to expand it mostly because of missed shots. The 49ers shot 29 percent from the field in the second half after hitting 40 percent of their shots in the first.

The missed shots also opened up rebounding opportunities for senior center Dan Jennings, who finished with a career-high 17 boards. His previous best was 11 in a game against UC Davis last year.

“I worked on my body, mentally and physically getting better [in the offseason],” Jennings said. “It just showed tonight, and I got those results.”

Beyond Jennings, who also scored 10 points to earn a double-double, and Caffey, who set a career-high with 27 points, the 49ers were a little empty in the stat sheet. Transfer forward David Samuels was the best of the rest with eight rebounds and 11 points, but fouls and missed shots were recurring issues throughout the rest of the lineup.

“They all got out there, and they kind of got that first game out of their system,” Monson said of the six players who played their first minutes for LBSU. “We had come new guys that were really frustrated and couldn’t get comfortbable … I didn’t think any of our new guys really got in rhythym.”

LBSU’s lead was cut down to as little as five with less than two minutes to play. The 49ers made five free throws in the final 30 seconds, though, and they won by a comfortable 12 points, 71-59.

Next up for the Beach is a trip to Arizona, where it will take on the highly-ranked Wildcats. Arizona is ranked sixth in the country by the Associated Press and fifth in the USA Today Coaches Poll.

The game is set to start at 7 p.m. on Monday at Arizona’s McKale Center. It will be broadcast on the Pac-12 Network.