MISSOULA, Mont. » It wasn’t the winter weather that cooled off the Hawaii men’s basketball team.

It was the red-hot Montana Grizzlies.

Big Sky Conference co-leader Montana captured its 15th win in its last 16 outings with a 94-79 decision of the Rainbow Warriors on Saturday night in a BracketBusters game in front of 5,009 fans at Dahlberg Arena.

Hawaii, which had won four of its previous five, dropped to 15-11 overall. The Rainbows will continue their long road trip with WAC games Thursday at New Mexico State and Saturday at Louisiana Tech.

Hawaii ran into something of a buzz saw at Montana. The Grizzlies shot 58 percent from the field, including 48 percent (11-for-23) from 3-point range, and led by double digits for most of the game. Junior point guard Will Cherry led the Griz with 24 points, but 6-foot-5 sophomore wing Kareem Jamar stole the show with a triple-double — 21 points, 11 rebounds, 11 assists.

"That’s a good backcourt — big, strong guards who can both drive it and hit it," Hawaii coach Gib Arnold said. "Obviously, Jamar going for a triple-double, that’s probably his career night. Those guys were tough on both ends of the floor."

The Griz (20-6) led 47-34 at halftime as the Rainbows struggled to get the ball inside to center Vander Joaquim and power forward Joston Thomas. Joaquim finished with 17 points and 10 rebounds, but never got going until the game was just about out of reach. Thomas finished with 11, but was hindered by foul trouble and was eventually ejected following a flagrant foul with 2:55 to play.

"I thought that was probably the game plan, to get it inside more," Arnold said. "The first half we weren’t able to do it. The second half we did a little better job. Again, we were getting fouled and couldn’t hit foul shots and they were coming down and hitting 3s. That adds up over the course of 40 minutes. They were just hitting too many shots for us to keep up."

Hawaii converted just 19 of 34 free throws.

The Rainbows cut Montana’s 13-point halftime advantage to nine on three occasions early in the second half, the last on a dunk by Joaquim that made it 53-44 with 16:50 to play. But Cherry took over for the Griz, hitting a pull-up jumper, driving to the bucket for another score and coming up with one of his five steals that the Griz cashed in for a layup and a 62-46 lead. Hawaii never got closer than 11 the rest of the way.

"I thought offensively they were great — red hot and knocking down shots," Arnold said of the Griz. "Guys that normally don’t hit shots were knocking them down, which spread us out. We were having a hard time containing them, and when you hit that many 3s and get hot like that, you’re playing catch-up all night.

"Give them a lot of credit, they stepped up. It looked like they had some nice, rested legs and they knocked them down. There were times when it seemed like they just weren’t missing."