City of Basketball Love

Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
__

For the time being, Drexel isn’t a part of the Big 5.

The Dragons are left out of the other city Division I basketball program’s annual round robin tournament (at least for now).

Drexel still typically gets its chances against the other local programs. The Dragons took Penn to the wire and played Temple tough for about 32 minutes earlier this season.

They finally broke through for their first City 6 win of the season on Saturday, locking down La Salle in the extra period for a 65-58 overtime win at Tom Gola Arena.

“It’s a gold jersey game,” said junior Amari Williams, who filled up the box score with 14 points, 11 rebounds, four blocks, four assists and two steals. “We feel like we’ve been disrespected this year in the city. … We played three of the teams and they’ve all been close games and we beat La Salle took, so I see us in that group. We don’t really care what the outside says.”

COVID canceled matchups with Temple and La Salle (5-5) last season, but Drexel did take down St. Joe’s in its only City 6 game.

The Dragons (5-5) had their chances against Penn in a 64-59 loss Nov. 15 and were tied with Temple with 8:15 to play in a 73-61 loss Nov. 27. They scored the first six points of overtime on Saturday, including a monster two-handed slam by Williams, to take control of the game and make sure they didn’t leave the season empty handed in their city rival games.

With Saturday’s win, the Dragons are now 3-3 in match-ups against the rest of the City 6 over the past three seasons. That includes two wins over St. Joe’s, a split with La Salle and losses to Temple and Penn earlier this season.

“Our last 10 games, we’ve won five of them now, and I think our guys are motivated by that,” Drexel coach Zach Spiker said.

Powered by freshman forward Rokas Jocius, who scored all 12 of his points in the first half, La Salle got up to an eight-point lead, 23-15, with 5:47 left in the first. Drexel senior Coletrane Washington, who led the Dragons with 21 points, got hot down the stretch and a buzzer beater by junior Jamie Bergens tied the score 31-31 at the break.

Not much separated the squads until Drexel senior  Luke House drilled a three with 3:40 to go to put the Dragons ahead 53-48. They ended up being Drexel’s last points of regulation.

La Salle junior Anwar Gill (15 points) rattled off five straight, including an and-one, to tie the game 53-53 with two and a half minutes left. Both teams had several chances to go up, but Gill missed a shot in the lane and Washington couldn’t get a similar look to go in the final seconds of regulation.

“We struggled to score,” La Salle coach Fran Dunphy said. “I thought our defense was OK. Our defensive numbers will be fine, but we needed a stop here or there and we needed a basket on a number of occasions. We couldn't get that done and as a result, Drexel has a nice win and we have a disappointing loss.”

The Dragons headed into this one after taking a whooping from Princeton, 83-63, last Saturday when they allowed the Tigers to shoot 53.8 percent of the floor. Led by Jucius, La Salle shot 48.1 percent from the floor in the first half, but Drexel clamped them down to 31 percent in the second half and 1-for-9 on field goal attempts in the overtime period.

Drexel went ahead 59-53 with 44 seconds left in OT on a pair of Washington free throws. The Explorers didn’t get on the board in the extra period until junior Jhamir Brickus (12 points) hit a pair of foul shots with 33 seconds left. Their only other scoring in the extra period was a Brickus three with seven seconds left and the game already out of reach.

“Practice was tough this week,” Williams said. “They kind of got after us about it, but we buckled down in this game and got the job done.”

“We dug into a deep reserve energy in overtime to really sit down and guard,” Spiker said.

La Salle had success offensively in its two most recent games — an 84-81 win at Penn last weekend and an 82-72 victory over Bucknell earlier this week — even without sophomore guard Khalil Brantley, who was out for the second straight game after going down with an injury against Penn.

That wasn’t the same case on Saturday as it was a real struggle to score the ball for the last 25 minutes. 

“Our ball movement has to be better,” Dunphy said. “When you look at our number of turnovers, 10 in 45 minutes is pretty good, but our assists — seven assists on 23 made baskets — we need to share the ball better than we did. We need to make better decisions on a number of occasions. I thought we were at the rim a number of times and couldn’t finish. For the most part, our offense needs work.”

Drexel shot just 34.2 percent from the floor and 4-of-23 from three, and those numbers won’t win many basketball games. But unlike the 2021-22 group that ranked No. 1 in the CAA in offense on the way to a league title and the first NCAA tournament appearance in 26 seasons, Spiker believes this team can win games with its defense like it showed Saturday.

KenPom currently ranks the Dragons with the country’s 210th best offense and 178th defense, which both rank fifth in the CAA respectively.

“We’ve won a championship and we were able to be the No. 1 offensive team in the league and went to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 26 years and we had a great offense,” Spiker said. Our defense was OK. Now, our defense is much better and we want to challenge and see what we can do from that standpoint as well as play good offense.

“I think we just gotta be consistent with it,” Williams said. “Once we do that, I think a lot of the games we lost we would have won. Offensively it will come, so we just gotta make sure we show up on defense.”

La Salle unveils Tom Gola statute

The namesake of La Salle’s home arena, Tom Gola, was further immortalized before Saturday’s game. La Salle unveiled an eight-foot tall statue outside the arena for the former Explorers’ standout and head coach, who died in 2014.

Gola was a standout at La Salle College High School and then for the Explorers, where he led the program to a national title in 1954 and national runner-up finish in 1955. Hebecame the first 2,000-point, 2,000-rebound player and four-time All-American in college basketball history. Gola’s career spanned from 1951-55 and piled up 2,461 points and 2,201 rebounds, which still rank third and first, respectively in La Salle history.

He later went onto play for 10 years in the NBA, where he became part of a select group to win NIT, NCAA and NBA titles. Gola also coached the Explorers for two seasons, leading La Salle to a 23-1 record in 1968-69.

“It was nice for the family, nice for me as the basketball coach here to experience that,” Dunphy said. “I thought La Salle showed great in that part.”

~~~