It’s really not that hard to find the potential cloud in a 100-69 win for the home team. Here it is: UC Riverside is not a good basketball team, not good at all.
The 6-12 Highlanders are almost as bad as UC Davis, where they stole a conference win against a 5-13 team two nights prior to getting blown off the Stan Sheriff Center court Saturday faster than it took a spilled plate of nachos to get cleaned off the floor.
They are so bad that we can’t draw too much about how the Rainbow Warriors will do the rest of the way in the Big West from this one mismatch — especially with UH coming off two road losses to start the conference slate.
That’s why it was good to see coach Gib Arnold call a timeout less than three minutes into the second half, with Hawaii up 65-38 and the Rainbow Warriors "winning" 9-8 after the break.
The last line of defense at the rim was getting a bit porous, and the coach had just talked about that very topic in the locker room.
And this: "They went on a 40-12 run against UC Davis. I wrote that up on the board at halftime," Arnold said.
Brandon Spearman — who supplemented Christian Standhardinger’s 27 points with 18 — said Arnold sensed less energy at the start of the second half.
"(He) just tried to get us refocused. They came out and hit every shot. Just to refocus us and keep playing hard," Spearman said of the timeout.
I liked that Arnold somehow managed to draw a technical foul with a 35-point lead. Standhardinger said the message was for the players not to get "comfortable, content." Arnold said it was about supporting reserve post Stefan Jovanovic. "I wanted him to feel I had his back" after a call against him.
It kept the crowd going, too.
After those two defeats at the hands of college basketball powerhouses Cal Poly and Cal State Northridge, I thought the fans would drop off … maybe go see "The Lion King" instead. But they showed up, about 6,250 strong — they remembered the UH team that had won nine of 10, and that’s what they got to see again this time.
The crowd helped the Rainbow Warriors get off to a blistering 15-1 lead, spurred more by intense defense than anything else.
With a couple of nudges from their coach, they kept the intensity going in the second half. Even the bench guys got through what Brian McInnis correctly called "glorified summer league play."
They kept up the momentum in the postgame presser, speaking of predators, wounded deers and heads of snakes.
Let’s see if all that transfers better for these next two road games than it did the first time.
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Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 528-4783. Read his blog at staradvertiser.com/quickreads.
