MOSCOW, Idaho - Senior Steffan Johnson put the exclamation point on his Idaho career Saturday by carrying the Vandal basketball team to a Senior Night win over Hawai'i by a 78-69 margin at the Cowan Spectrum.
Johnson put together the Western Athletic Conference's top 3-point shooting effort by nailing eight from downtown and leading the team with 28 points. The eight made 3-pointers are tied for the second-most in school history and 19th in the NCAA this year, while his 14 attempts from long range are an Idaho record.
"I thought we did as good of a job passing the ball to each other as we've done all year and maybe in the two years that I've been here," Idaho head coach Don Verlin said. "I thought they did a good job of finding the guy with the hot hand and getting it to him, and tonight Steffan Johnson delivered."
Mac Hopson, another Vandal senior, made his presence known, as he tied a career high with 11 assists and no turnovers and added 15 points for his third career double-double.
"That was my teammates - that was all them," Hopson said of the assist performance."I give my teammates credit for that, for sure."
As a team, the Vandals knocked down a team and WAC season-high 14 shots from 3-point range, while holding Hawai'i to just 2-of-10 from long range. The Rainbow Warriors outscored the Vandals 40-18 in the paint and 19-4 on second-chance points after out-rebounding Idaho, 41-26, but Idaho's long-range attack made the difference.
The win moves Idaho to 15-15 overall and 6-10 in the WAC. It also locks Idaho into a tie for sixth in the conference with San Jose State and gives the Vandals a No. 7 seed in next week's WAC Tournament. Hawai'i slips to 10-20 overall and 3-13 in WAC play. Boise State's win over SJSU earlier in the day eliminated the Warriors from the WAC Tournament.
Idaho will play host Nevada in the first round of the WAC Tournament on Thursday. The Vandals lost both games to the Wolf Pack this season, including one earlier in Moscow in which the Vandals let a late lead slip away in the closing seconds.
"I really believe we're a team that can make a run in the tournament," Verlin said. "Like I told our guys (tonight) afterward, it's the team that plays the best for 40 minutes now, not the team that plays best for four months.
"I really believe anybody can get hot and upset anybody in our tournament and we've got to go and do everything we can to win that first-round game."
As a team, Idaho shot 49.2 percent from the field and 51.9 percent from 3-point range. The Vandals had a season-high 21 assists and a season-low five turnovers. In addition to Johnson's 8-of-14 performance from long range, Hopson also went 3-of-7 and fellow senior Luciano de Souza went 3-of-4.
Hawai'i went 29-of-63 from the floor for a 46.0 percentage. The Warriors committed nine turnovers and had 12 assists. Junior Roderick Flemings led all scorers with 29 points on 13-of-26 shooting, along with a team-high five assists.
The win is Idaho's second-straight Senior Night victory. The Vandals had lost their previous five Senior Night games between 2004 and 2008.
"When you're playing your last game in front of your home fans, if you can come out and have a good night, that's something that stays with you for the rest of your life," Verlin said.
While Idaho led for much of the second half, the Warriors kept things too close for comfort and took a number of small leads early in the period before Johnson's outburst. After UH's Brandon Adams' putback at the 12:53 mark gave the Warriors a 49-47 lead, Idaho went off.
The Vandals hit eight of their next 10 shots, four of them Johnson 3-balls and another a Johnson fast-break slam, then capped off their run by hitting six straight free throws. The result was a 10-point lead at 76-66 with less than two minutes remaining.
"That's been our whole goal this whole year - to play well at the right time and there can't be any other time that's better than right before you go to the WAC Tournament," Johnson said. "We just need to keep our momentum and our intensity up going into this tournament and we have a real good chance of doing well."
Idaho's game against Nevada will tip off at 6 p.m. (PST) on Thursday.
