CARBONDALE, Ill. — Leading by four points with four minutes to go, Southern Illinois finished the game on a 14-3 run to put away a pesky Saint Louis team, 70-55, on Wednesday night at SIU Arena.
The Salukis (6-5) were led by Armon Fletcher, who had a career-
Saluki forward Sean O’ Brien drives around Billiken defender Jalon Johnson (SIU Media Services photo.)
high 21 points, while Sean O’Brien pitched in a double-double with 13 points and 13 rebounds. Thik Bol added 14 points.
The key shot of the night, though, came from guard Sean Lloyd, who made his first-career start for SIU. With his team clinging to a 58-54 lead, Lloyd drained a 3-pointer from the right wing with four minutes to go that gave his club some breathing room.
“He comes down the floor and I yell at my staff that Sean’s scared to death — and that’s paraphrased,” Hinson said. “When he caught the ball, he shoots a three and he sticks it, and he looks right at me. I guess that’s how you gotta coach guys from Philly.”
The final eight possessions for Saint Louis included four missed shots and three turnovers, and SIU sealed the win with six free throws by Mike Rodriguez, plus layups by O’Brien and Bol.
The Billikens (3-7) played without leading scorer and starting point guard Jermaine Bishop, but they had no trouble knocking down shots in the first half, converting 7-of-12 from 3-point range. Their largest lead was eight points, 25-17, on a 3-pointer by Aaron Hines, a former walk-on, who started in place of Bishop.
SLU entered the game ranked No. 328 in 3-point shooting percentage (28 percent), but Southern checked in with a 3-point shooting defense that also ranked No. 328. The Billikens won that battle, as five-different players connected from downtown.
“I wondered how we’d play, because we’ve been so short-handed in practice, and without our point guard, and we’re pretty short-handed to begin with anyway,” said first-year Saint Louis head coach Travis Ford. “So we had some fight early. I was proud of how we executed early.”
Southern struggled at times against SLU’s zone defense. The team’s only consistent threat from outside the arc this season has been Fletcher, and he delivered a 4-for-7 night from downtown. His teammates were 1-for-7.
“We don’t have a lot of confidence,” Hinson acknowledged. “The greatest defense to play against a team with no confidence is a zone, because it makes you stagnant. We got stagnant offensively, we got stagnant defensively, and we were lulled to sleep.”
Trailing by two at halftime, the Salukis woke up in the second half, surging to a lead, 40-38, on a trey by Fletcher. Defensively, they held their opponent to 36 percent in the second half. Saint Louis stayed within one or two possessions until late in the game, but 21 turnovers were their undoing, including an inordinate amount of traveling violations.
“We were our own worst enemy a lot of the time,” Ford said. “When you’re shooting 60 percent in the half and have 11 turnovers, we thought we should have had a bigger lead at halftime and taken advantage of us actually running offense and making a few shots.”
Saint Louis is in full rebuilding mode under Ford. The Billikens have three transfers sitting out, and on top of that, starting guards Mike Crawford and Davell Roby didn’t practice the last two days with injuries, Ford said, though they ended up playing in the game.
“I was proud of our team being able to keep it all together after the couple days have been pretty rough on our basketball team,” he said.
Southern snapped a two-game losing streak, and after he questioned the team’s effort in Saturday’s loss to Sam Houston State, Hinson became emotional during his postgame remarks to the media tonight.
“You gotta have guys that want to fight,” he said, raising his voice. “You gotta have guys that want to compete. We didn’t do that in the last two games. That was our whole message tonight — when you get out on that wood floor, why don’t you compete! Why don’t you fight a little bit!”
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