(John Barker Photo)
The Wyoming Cowboy basketball team got out to a blazing hot start against the Nevada Wolfpack on senior night. However, it wasn’t a senior that was lighting up the box score for the Cowboys in this one – rather it was junior Khaden Bennett.
Bennett was undoubtedly the biggest factor in the Cowboys’ 83-73 drubbing of the Wolfpack, a final score that seems much closer than most of the contest actually was. Bennett tied a career-high in three-point makes with six triples coming in the first half, as he finished with a career-high 27 points while also stuffing the box score with seven rebounds, five assists and three steals – a game high in all of those as well.
“As a shooter, once you see that first one go in, you feel like you can’t miss,” Bennett said. “It’s just good to see the first one go in and just keep it rolling.”
The Cowboys’ close encounter with winless-in-league play Air Force the game prior feels like a distant memory with how the Cowboys dominated the Wolfpack – particularly for Bennett, who had just three points and was 0-of-3 from deep against the Falcons.
“It sparked us a lot because you guys know we should come out like [we did today] against Air Force. We had a lot of grit and hunger to come out and get this win today,” senior Leland Walker said.
The Cowboys took little time to jump out to an early double-digit advantage, as a hammer dunk by freshman Gavin Gores gave the Cowboys a 15-4 lead in the opening minutes of the opening half.
The Wolfpack would answer with a 10-0 run to cut that lead down to a single point, but the Cowboys quickly responded with a 14-0 run of their own to regain a dominant advantage in the first half. The Cowboys would transform their lead into a 21-point edge by halftime after an extremely efficient half where they would shoot 20-of-29 (69%) from the field and 7-of-15 (46.7%) from deep, with six of those triples coming off the hand of Bennett.
The Wolfpack wouldn’t go down without a fight, though, as they would continue to chip away at the Cowboys’ lead throughout the second half. With two and a half minutes the Wolfpack had managed to climb within eight points, but the Cowboys would quickly put their comeback to rest at the free throw line in a wire-to-wire victory.
“We just lost focus, and Nevada’s going to fight, that’s what they do and they’re a good program,” head coach Sundance Wicks said. “They weren’t going to let us just walk away with this, but there were so many things that [our team] did tonight to just make sure we found a way to win.”
Sophomore Damarion Dennis finished his night with 18 points, shooting a highly effective 9-of-13 from the floor. Gores paced him with 11 points, and Walker capped off his final home game as the last scorer in double-figures for the Cowboys with 10 points.
The Cowboys now have quietly won four of their last five games in league play, their only loss in that stretch coming on the road at Boise State – an encouraging trend for the Cowboys as they approach the postseason. The Cowboys have not won a game in the Mountain West tournament since the 2021-22 season, where they lost in the semifinals.
Coincidentally, that’s the last time the Cowboys had a winning season as well. That changed tonight.
“Winning season, first one since 21-22. There’s still more games we play but I was proud of that locker room to know that we’ve guaranteed ourselves a chance to have a winning season, and that’s hard to do at Wyoming,” Wicks said.
“That’s a tip of the cap to all those guys in our locker room, because we’re doing it with young guys, a lot of new guys and they come in here, and these guys could have folded in so many different times this year and they just kept fighting.”
The Cowboys have one last regular season contest before taking to the conference tournament next week, as they will face San Jose State on the road this Saturday.
