STATESBORO – Johnathan Stove tallied 28 points and seven rebounds off the bench, and Louisiana shot 55 percent in the first half on its way to a 102-91 Sun Belt Conference men's basketball victory over Georgia Southern Saturday evening in Hanner Fieldhouse.
Saddled with two fouls three minutes into the contest, Georgia Southern's leading scorer
Tookie Brown scored all 29 of his points in the second half.
Ike Smith netted a season high 25 points with four rebounds and four blocked shots for Georgia Southern (16-10, 7-6), and
David-Lee Jones Jr. scored 11.
Quan Jackson finished with 10 points, five rebounds and four steals.
Frank Bartley posted 21 points, five rebounds and three assists for Louisiana (21-4, 11-1), and Bryce Washington finished with 18 points, 13 rebounds and three blocked shots. Malik Marquetti scored 13.
The story
Marquetti hit two 3-pointers, including one just before the buzzer sounded, in a 16-2 Louisiana run to finish the first half. Washington scored six points during the stretch, and the Ragin' Cajuns held the Eagles without a field goal for over five minutes to go into the break with a 52-38 cushion.
GS scored six straight points and cut the margin to nine on an and-1 putback by
Coye Simmons, but Louisiana scored the next 11 points. Bartley ignited the run with a 3-pointer, and JaKeenan Gant added a pair of dunks as the Ragin' Cajuns pushed the margin to 20 with 12:22 left in the contest.
Brown scored 21 points in the last 6:53 of the contest to help the Eagles chip the lead down to nine points twice and eight points with 43 seconds left, but Louisiana went 9 for 10 from the free-throw line in the last two minutes to keep the Eagles at bay.
Quotables from Head coach Mark Byington
Overall
"I'm really proud of our guys' effort; I thought we played really hard. What let us down was our transition defense and our rebounding. We gave up too many important 3s in the first half, and the game was really decided in the last two-and-a-half minutes of the first half when we made some defensive errors, some transition defense errors and some rebounding errors. But if our guys' effort is like that, we'll fix it. I'm anxious to get back to practice for a week because we need to get back to some fundamentals. We made too many defensive errors and gave them too many chances to beat a good team, and we have to fix it."
On the turning points of the game
"The whole game changed when Tookie got his second foul. We started the game great, and I thought everything was working well, and when he got his second foul, we were able to keep battling and battling for a while. I thought David Jones did a good job of holding us together in the first half, but some guys started getting tired. There was a couple times where it was mental fatigue as much as physical fatigue. We played some guys that were playing well on offense but struggled with our transition defense. So Tookie getting his second foul and the last two-and-a-half minutes of the first half were the difference in the halftime score, which we couldn't overcome."
On rebounding
"When they are as good as they are, you can't give them easy baskets. The transition easy baskets they finished at the rim and the second-chance baskets were just too easy. You can't give them that many points. There was a couple times we had open shots where we could have taken the lead from 11 down to eight and then who knows what could happen, but we played hard all the way through. We have to do a much better job rebounding. This is one of the best rebounding teams we've had in three years, and it did not show tonight. We forgot what it takes to be able to beat a team like this."
Next up
Georgia Southern hosts Georgia State Friday at 9 p.m. in a national ESPN2 broadcast in Hanner Friday, Feb. 16. One point will be on the line in the Southern vs. State Rivalry Series, which State leads 8.5-0.5. Promotions: White Out – wear white for the annual white out game!
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