Stephen Curry vs. Patty Mills

Last Tuesday night Patty Mills carried the Gaels to a victory over Wash. State and set up a matchup between two of the best guards in the country. Patty Mills vs. Davidson's Stephen Curry. For a mid-major game this was a matchup of the century. Patty Mills the Australian Sensation, who has taken over the St. Mary's basketball program and turned it into a national force to be reckoned with, vs. Stephen Curry who is the nations leading scorer and last year led Davidson into the sweet 16 of the NCAA tourney. The best part of this game was that St. Mary's and Davidson are basically the same team. St. Mary's was going to make the tournament easily until Patty Mills went down with an injury and Davidson was going to make the tournament pretty easily until Stephen Curry went down with an injury. Those two injuries caused both teams to end up here in Moraga, California playing in the NIT, not for a NCAA championship but rather for mid-major pride.
For the most part the game itself was not a letdown. Stephen Curry was slowed down by great defense played by Wayne Hunter and Patty Mills but still managed to score 26 points. Patty Mills went 1 for 10 from 3-point range but scored 23 point and added 10 assists to only 1 turnover. The game was very close until the middle of the second half when St. Mary's slowly started to pull away. The Gaels played a very good game throughout and made Davidson beat them with players other than Patty Mills. Andrew Lovedale, Davidson's best big man played a lousy game. He was dominated by Omar Samhan on the offensive end. Defensively Diamon Simpson played well scoring 12 points while adding 15 rebounds. Overall in this game, Davidson was outmatched by St. Mary's and St. Mary's clearly was the better team.

Side Note: At the end of the game Patty Mills wanted everyone to storm the court because of our victory. This could prove to be symbolic because that gesture quite possibly means that this was Patty's last home game as a Gael. Although it will be sad for St. Mary's when Patty leaves this is probably the best year for him to go to the NBA. The draft is not very deep and right now Patty is playing extremely well. Besides his shooting there is nothing that Patty really has to learn and his shooting can be worked on at the next level. So for these reasons I think Patty is going to go to the NBA draft. (Hopefully he gets drafted by the Knicks so I can watch him play next year, that would be awesome).