Flames scorch Tops for 90-61 win at Diddle

Published 5:48 pm Saturday, March 8, 2025

By Jeff Nations

Western Kentucky’s men’s basketball team entered Saturday’s regular-season finale with an opportunity to make the path a little easier in next week’s Conference USA Tournament.

Beat Liberty and get a little help from UTEP against Louisiana Tech, and the Hilltoppers were assured of a No. 6 seed — and the first-round bye that comes with it — next week in Huntsville, Alabama.

The Flames wrecked that scenario with a 90-61 win to lock up their own coveted spot as the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament and earn the CUSA regular-season championship outright after Jacksonville State’s loss to Kennesaw State on Saturday.

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The loss dropped WKU (17-14 overall, 8-10 CUSA) to the No. 7 seed in next week’s CUSA Tournament. That means the Hilltoppers will lose two days of preparation and gain an extra game to contend with as they try to repeat as CUSA champions at Propst Arena. WKU will play No. 10 seed Florida International on Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

The hard road it is for the Tops.

“I do think that our team, when we’re playing well, can beat anybody,” WKU coach Hank Plona said. “But unfortunately we’ve shown that when things go wrong, we can come apart a little bit. We’ve got to figure out what our issues are here and address them pretty fast.”

Liberty (25-6, 13-5 CUSA) came out shooting against the Tops. The Flames led for more than 38 minutes, with Jayvon Maughmer’s 3-pointer putting the visitors ahead 3-2 with 18:16 left in the first half — a lead Liberty never gave up.

The Flames hit a trio of 3-pointers to grab a quick 9-4 lead and stretched it to 12-4 before WKU guard Don McHenry answered with a 3-pointer.

Liberty kept churning, with another trio of 3-pointers stretching an 18-10 lead to 27-10 with 9:42 left in the first half. Plona tried a time out, but Liberty’s Brett Decker Jr. came out of the break and hit yet another 3 to push the lead to 20.

Just to be sure, the Flames put together one more run — an 11-0 spurt caped by another Maughmer 3-pointer — to push ahead 41-13 with 3:36 left in the first half.

WKU trailed 49-22 at halftime — hardly the performance the program was looking for after honoring 13 players during a pregame Senior Day ceremony.

“That’s tough to go out like that on Senior Night, but we know starting Tuesday it’s a new season,” WKU senior guard Jalen Jackson said. “No home-court advantage. So we’ve just got to go out, play hard, play together and it’s March. Anything can happen.”

Liberty, which hit 16-of-34 from 3-point range (47.1%) in the game, had 10 triples by halftime. The Tops shot just 22.9% overall in the first half and were just 4-of-13 (30.8%) on 3s.

“I think they’re very versatile,” Jackson said. “And they hit shots tonight, they hit a lot of shots. But I think we’ve just got to stick to our game plan, play a little harder and do what we know we can do.”

The Tops had a much better offensive showing in the second half, with graduate senior guard Khristian Lander providing another second-half boost by scoring 15 of his team-high 18 points in the final 20 minutes.

Liberty matched the Tops basket-for-basket, plus one, to keep WKU from ever making a serious run. The Flames were intent to avoid a repeat of the first meeting this season, when the Hilltoppers outscored the Flames 34-19 over the final nine minutes to claim a 71-70 win in a game they never led until 54 seconds were left.

There would be no comeback Saturday.

“Obviously a disappointing Senior Day, last home game performance of this season,” Plona said. “There’s a lot of things that we need to do better. We’ve got three days to pinpoint exactly why when things go wrong they seem to be going way wrong for us. We’ve won three out of five games, but at the same time when we’re losing and struggling we seem to struggle stick with it. And obviously that’s not the characteristic of a championship team.”

Maughmer finished with a game-high 21 points and was 5-of-5 on 3-pointers. He also grabbed 15 rebounds for a double-double. Taelon Peter added 21 points, Decker added 16 points and Zach Cleveland had 12 points in the win. Cleveland had eight of the Flames’ 22 assists. Maughmer had six assists.

McHenry added 14 points and Jackson had eight points for the Hilltoppers, who finished shooting just 23-of-68 (33.8%) from the field.

Sports Editor, Bowling Green Daily News

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