Coming off an improved defensive effort, Mississippi State will look to continue its positive start to the season when in-state foe Jackson State visits Starkville on Monday night.
Mississippi State (2-0) has a pair of easy wins. In their 82-44 victory over Northwestern State on Thursday, the Bulldogs showed they had learned something from a 106-88 opening win over Tennessee Tech last Monday.
“It gave me an opportunity to kind of rally the troops,” Bulldogs coach Chris Jans said of the Bulldogs’ improvement from one game to the next. “I think they came out of the gate with the defensive mindset.”
Mississippi State held Northwestern State to 29.8% shooting from the field (14 of 47), and Josh Hubbard led the Bulldogs with 15 points. Reserve King Grace added 12 points, and Kimani Hamilton chipped in 10 points and seven rebounds.
Hubbard has 40 points this season and is just 13 points shy of 2,000 for his Mississippi State career. That would make him the fourth Bulldogs player to reach that mark, but Hubbard is just 155 points shy of tying Jeff Malone’s all-time school scoring mark of 2,142 points.
Jackson State (1-1) enters Monday’s game off a surprising win for its first-year head coach, Trey Johnson, in an 87-85 victory over Tulane on Thursday.
The Tigers rallied from a 15-point deficit and won after Tulane tried to call a timeout it did not have with possession of the ball and 1.6 seconds remaining in a tie game. Daeshun Ruffin drained the technical free throws and Dorian McMillian helped force a miss on Tulane’s final shot to preserve the victory.
McMillian leads the Tigers with an average of 16.5 points per game, and he tallied 23 points and seven rebounds in the win. Reserve Mike Williams added 20 points on 4-for-7 shooting from 3-point range, and Ruffin notched 17 points after the game-winning free throws. Williams (15.5 ppg) and Ruffin (11) are the other double-figure scorers in the young season.
“I think the guys that we’ve got in the room, we’re a team that can really go and shake things up and play any style of basketball,” Johnson said.