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California Golden Bears vs Notre Dame Fighting Irish Basketball Recap

Notre Dame 57, California 44

It was a memorable Friday evening at HP Field House in suburban Orlando in the semifinals of the Old Spice Classic holiday tournament.

The only problem – especially for the California Golden Bears – was that the afternoon was memorable in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons.

In a game that set back the sport of basketball at least 25 years if not more, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish advanced at this Thanksgiving hoops feast by winning a game that was hard to stomach. One day after Americans enjoyed a platter of turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings, Notre Dame and Cal served up a heaping helping of ineptitude that no one could digest with a straight face.

There’s just no getting around the fact that this was cringe-worthy basketball at its worst. Consider a few simple statistics to put the matter in proper perspective:

Notre Dame hit only 9-of-32 field goal attempts in the first half and went 0-of-13 from 3-point range. The Irish were sluggish, inconsistent and removed from the flow of the game. Coach Mike Brey’s team from the Big East Conference scored only 21 points in the game’s first 20 minutes, going to the halftime locker room on pace to score just 42 points for the entire contest.

At halftime, the boys from South Bend, Indiana, led by 16 points.

Yes, do the simple math in your head. Roll the numbers around. No, it’s not a misprint or a sick holiday joke. On the day that many Americans refer to as Black Friday, the California Golden Bears truly lived in a world of basketball darkness. The exact opposite of “shooting the lights out” is to be turned off by your shooting. That’s how coach Mike Montgomery’s team handled its first 20 minutes, which were straight from a basketball version of hell.

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Yes, if Notre Dame scored 21 points in the first half but led by 16, that means Cal scored only five points before the intermission. It’s true. While Notre Dame shot just barely over 25 percent, the boys from the San Francisco Bay Area hit only eight percent of their shots, making only 2-of-25 attempts from the field and going  0-for-8 from long distance.

The second half was a normal half of basketball, as Cal outscored Notre Dame by a 39-36 margin, but after the train wreck in the first half, the Bears were never able to get particularly close. Allen Crabbe had 10 points and 10 rebounds and Harper Kamp scored nine for California, which couldn't recover from its awful start. The Golden Bears trimmed the deficit to 10 late but never produced a truly serious rally.

Carleton Scott paced Notre Dame with 16 points and 10 rebounds. In a game with a lot of missed shots, rebounding was very important, which magnified the value of the 11 rebounds pulled down by Notre Dame’s Tim Abromaitis.

By Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Staff Writer