After suffering a gnarly ankle roll on Saturday against Saint Mary’s, Jake Toolson went from being a game-time decision going into Portland to being one of the Cougars’ starters come tipoff.
But if there was any doubt if Toolson was healthy, he put everyone at ease by scoring 22 points to help lead BYU to an 85-54 victory at Portland, Ore.
Toolson went 8 for 10 from the field and 6 of 8 on 3-pointers in 28 minutes of action.
Before Thursday, coach Mark Pope wasn’t expecting to beat Portland by more than 20 points again like his Cougars did earlier this season. He was expecting a much closer battle with the Pilots.
But while the Cougars struggled a bit in the first half, they shot 51% from the field while holding Portland to 28% and were still able to blow the game out of the water.
Since visiting Provo for the first game of the series against BYU, the Pilots have lost eight straight, dropping to 9-16 this season. The Cougars, on the other hand, are on a three-game winning streak and improve to 18-7.
Tied 9-all after the opening minutes, BYU went on an 8-0 run, forcing Portland to call a timeout two minutes later. While the Pilots were able to stay in the game, they never gave the Cougars much of a challenge until later in the first half.
Down by 10 points with about four minutes left in the half, the Pilots were looking to get the ship righted and go into halftime with some momentum. And they did have it for a while — cutting their deficit to four points — but the Cougars regained control.
By the end of the half, Yoeli Childs made his first field goal of the game and got the and-1 to head into halftime with a 43-31 lead.
The Cougars had seven (uncharacteristic) turnovers in the first half that the Pilots converted into 11 points. BYU has been averaging 11.2 turnovers so far this season.
But then the Cougars seemed to be revived, scoring the first eight points of the second half to lead by 20.
Then the Pilots really started to struggle. Portland went 0 for 9 over a 7:40 scoring drought as BYU continued building its lead.
Portland continued to struggle to put any points on the board while BYU got their largest lead of the night — 36.
With a couple minutes left in the game, Pope cleared the benches to give some other players, such as Blaze Nield, Evan Troy and Taylor Maughan, valuable minutes.
Childs recovered from a slow first half to tie with Toolson for a team-high 22 points. The big man also brought down eight rebounds and made a block.
Alex Barcello added 17 points, four rebounds and a steal, while TJ Haws scored seven points and made a team-high eight assists.
BYU’s Kolby Lee broke his personal record with a team-best 10 rebounds against the Pilots.
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