City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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Recently, the play of two Drexel players has been a major factor in the Dragons’ overachieving start to the 2016-17 season.

One of them, Wake Forest transfer Miles Overton, he hadn’t played basketball in over two years before opening this season. The other, junior forward Austin Williams, simply struggled to find his rhythm as a freshman and sophomore before finally getting things going.

And although the Dragons fell by a final tally of 75-67 to Penn on Wednesday, the contributions of Overton and Williams to keep things close throughout were a continuation of their improved play over the last two months for head coach Zach Spiker’s Drexel team.

The way Williams in particular kicked things off in Drexel’s Wednesday afternoon tilt with Penn followed the general pattern of his last two months of play.

For the first time in his career as a Dragon, the junior forward is making some noise; his rim-rocking slam off an alley-oop from Kurk Lee provided the game’s first points in explosive fashion.

“If you look at (Williams’) numbers from last year’s he’s developed on the offensive end,” Spiker said. “I think he’s been in a situation where he can get the ball in the basket, he’s got a place on the floor where he feels real comfortable, he’s playing with some confidence there.”

Until this season, the junior forward has been relatively quiet. Over his first two years in the program, the 6-foot-8 Virginia-native averaged under 10 minutes per game, during which he scored a total of 26 points in 27 games.

Now six weeks into his junior year, Williams averages 7.1 ppg and 7.8 rpg, and has started in all 13 of Drexel’s games. After last year’s 35 percent field goal shooting mark, he’s now shooting at a 63.9 percent clip.

Wednesday, he finished with a strong output of 11 points and eight rebounds on a perfect 5-of-5 from the field, despite spending the majority of the second half hampered with four fouls.

“I know we’re better when he’s doing the things he does defensively for us,” Spiker added of Williams, who defended Penn’s leading scorer, freshman A.J. Brodeur, in Wednesday’s loss. “Foul trouble kind of hurt us a little bit today.”

The Dragons’ leading scorer in the loss to Penn, Overton, has also been getting hot of late, averaging 13.0 ppg and scoring double-digits in five of his last six outings after transferring and sitting all of last season and then averaging 5.0 ppg in his first five games of the year.

“I’m happy for him,” Spiker said of Overton. “I think his season has been up and down, I think this will certainly be a positive and will propel to do the things he’s capable of doing. It was good to see him have success out there tonight for sure.”

He finished with a career-high 19 points to pace Drexel, and connected on five triples despite entering the game having hit just nine of his 40 long-range attempts this season. 

The last two of those threes came in extremely clutch moments, the first of which finished a critical run to cut Penn’s lead to 64-62, as Overton connected from the corner with 5:32 to go to cap off a 15-4 run.

He once again cut the Quaker lead to two with 1:22 to play, but his efforts weren’t enough to ever regain the lead for Drexel.

“He makes 3-pointers in practice, a lot of them,” Spiker said. “Certainly doesn’t matter how many you make, you just want to take the best ones. We’ll evaluate that and look at film and use it as a teaching tool, but I thought for the most part he took pretty clean looks today.”

Although Wednesday’s outcome may not have been what the Dragons were looking for, the play of their two recent standouts, Williams and Overton, were in large part what kept things interesting down the stretch.

And, most importantly, the improvements they’ve made this season can’t be understated as they head forward into CAA play.

“I think we’re 6-7,” Spiker joked about where he currently sees his team’s progress. “The conference is just the next game, we don’t want to make a big deal about that,it’s not a new season. We learned a lot about our guys in our first thirteen games...but we’re nowhere near where we should be. We need to remain very hungry and on edge collectively as a whole and also individually.”