Game Summary

WINONA, Minn. — As if having to face the nation's third-ranked team wasn't tough enough, Saint John's had to go and make St. Thomas angry.

And the Tommies took out their frustrations on the Saint Mary's University men's basketball team Saturday afternoon.

St. Thomas — which suffered its first Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference loss of the season Wednesday when Saint John's went on a 6-0 run over the final 1:45 to beat UST 64-59 — held the Cardinals to 16 second-half points and cruised to a 73-46 victory at the SMU Gym.

"I thought we played pretty well in the first half, but we couldn't do anything right in the second half," said SMU coach Mike Trewick, whose team was coming off a 79-67 win over Concordia on Wednesday — a win that snapped SMU's season-high five-game losing streak. "Against a team like St. Thomas, you can't afford to shoot 19 percent in the second half like we did.

"We just couldn't get anything to drop, and it just seemed to snowball on us."

The Tommies led by as many as 10 in the first half, but a 10-0 Cardinal run turned that 10-point advantage into a 22-22 tie with 6:20 to play. Over the final six minutes, however, UST went on a 15-8 run to take a seven-point, 37-30 advantage into the locker room at the intermission.

And then things just seemed to fall apart for the Cardinals.

UST scored the first 10 points of the second half and never looked back in handing SMU its sixth loss in seven games.

"We knew coming in that St. Thomas was going to be tough — especially after losing to Saint John's on Wednesday," said Trewick, whose team shot just 32 percent from the field (18-for-55 and made just 1 of 18 3-pointers. "And you can't expect to hang with a team like that shooting the way we did.

"It was just one of those games … we just couldn't get the shots to fall, it's that simple."