You may have noticed Green Bay Phoenix head coach Doug Gottlieb talking up his star player Anthony Roy on a few occasions this offseason.

The 6’5” senior put the Horizon League on notice last night scoring a whopping 46-points helping the Phoenix to comfortable 102-73 victory over St. Norbert in the team’s only exhibition game of the season.

“I’m really excited for Ant to get a chance to play big time college basketball,” Gottlieb said in an interview with The Portal Report last month.  “He’s improved his game and worked on it and he’s, for the most part, bought into what we’re trying to get him to do and kind of expand his already good offensive repertoire. And then help him with any other little flaws we want to clean up.”

“If we finish top half, if we finish top three, he could be conference player of the year, he could be an all-conference guy.”

Stats for the game are not being made public “by mutual agreement” per the SNC website but according to WFRV-TV’s Kyle Malzhan, Roy scored 46 points in the game Thursday night, including 12 made three pointers. 

Had it not been an exhibition, the 46-point performance would have been a school record, surpassing the current record of 45 points set by Ray Willis in 1971 in a game against UW-Parkside.

Willis, Tony Bennett (twice) and Alec Brown are the only players in school history to score 40 or more points in a game.

The school record for made threes in a game – currently 9 held by four different players (Bennett, Troy Cotton, Ryan Tillema, and Matt Rohde) – would also have been broken.

“He’s a tremendous scorer,” Gottlieb told The Portal Report. “He just has a way that, he’s not crazy bouncy, he doesn’t have a crazy first step, he’s not the super elite shooter maybe that Foster [Wonders] is.  But he just knows how to score.”

“When we stat any sort of scrimmage, you look up and he’s his team’s leading scorer and he can do so in an efficient way as well.”

Roy, an Oakland, California native, was an NAIA All-American last season at Langston University where he averaged 18.4 points per game shooting 46.7% from the floor and 41.9% from behind the arc. 

Prior to his time at Langston, he showed flashes as a scorer at New Mexico State where he scored 20+ points in four of his thirteen appearances against Division I opponents with the program. 

With one season of college basketball left, the fifth year senior will play a crucial role in determining how far the Phoenix go in Gottlieb’s first season as a head coach. 

“He’s really bought into ‘you’re going to take the most shots, you’ve got to be a leader, you’re the oldest guy, you’ve got to be a leader’, and he really has.”