LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Facing an experienced Erie BayHawks team, the NBA G League Ignite suffered its first loss of the season on Wednesday at AdventHealth Arena.
Naji Marshall scored a team-high 21 points to lead the BayHawks while Jarrod Uthoff and Jalen Adams each contributed 17 points during the 127-87 route. Erie quickly jumped out to a 22-8 advantage during the first quarter as the lead eventually ballooned to 43 points in the contest.
On the other side, Jonathan Kuminga led the Ignite with 21 points and 10 rebounds, while Jalen Green and Daishen Nix each chipped in 13 points as the group dropped to 4-1 on the season. Aiding in the blowout loss, the Ignite committed 21 turnovers, which resulted in 36 points for Erie.
Additionally, the Ignite entered the contest as the second-best 3-point-shooting team in the league, but shot just 12.9% (4-of-31) from beyond the arc.
“The one good thing when you play professionally (and you) lose by 40, it just counts as one loss in the loss column,” Ignite head coach Brian Shaw said. “You flush it down the toilet. We got another game tomorrow. We just gotta get ready for the game tomorrow. What it came down to is they were hungrier to play against us than we were to play against them.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC_Gb15WUnM
The Ignite hadn’t faced much adversity this season, winning by 6.8 points per game prior to Wednesday. The opportunity to play an Erie team, which boasts multiple players with NBA experience, figured to provide a great challenge for the young prospects, but the group failed to execute throughout the contest.
After falling into an early 19-point deficit, Shaw wasn’t happy with the effort on the defensive end of the floor from that point forward and challenged his players the rest of the game.
“I think we responded the way that I thought we would, (and) it wasn’t necessarily a good thing,” Shaw said. “We got selfish on the offensive end and we just weren’t taking what the defense was giving us. We wanted to score and try to do it individually. In the timeouts, what I kept talking about is it wasn’t was happening on the offensive end, it was what was happening on the defensive end. We weren’t competing on that end. They were getting whatever they wanted. It felt like they had 5-on-0 practice with no defense out there at all.”
Following their first loss of the season, the Ignite will have plenty of film to watch to make adjustments. The team returns to play on Thursday versus the Westchester Knicks, and the game will provide a good chance to see how a young group of players can bounce back.
“We just gotta go back and review a couple of things that we didn’t do and just work on it,” Kuminga said. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see this team in the playoffs so we just gotta go watch film and work on stuff we didn’t do good.”
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