The Kennesaw State men’s basketball team finished the season with a .500 record in Atlantic Sun Conference play for the first time since the 2006-07 season, and just the third time since joining Division I, with a 73-57 win over Lipscomb on Thursday.
The win secured the Owls (11-19, 7-7) a 5 seed in the A-Sun tournament, the highest seed attained in the conference tournament in program history.
“It’s obviously a tremendous accomplishment for this team to end up .500,” KSU head coach Al Skinner said. “Considering where we were picked preseason and how difficult our nonconference schedule was. We worked our way through some injuries and our guys really hung in there. To be .500 in the conference, and beating some of the teams that we beat, even though the record may not indicate it, it ended up being a real fine season.”
Redshirt-junior Kendrick Ray recorded his fourth double-double of the season, leading the Owls with 26 points and 10 rebounds. Ray has averaged 23.2 points per game in the final five games of the season, scoring 20-plus points in four of them.
Senior Yonel Brown struggled offensively for a second straight game, finishing with 10 points despite shooting 2-14 from the field. Coach Skinner talked about the importance of his team’s resilience in spite of the shooting woes from their senior point guard.
“The most important thing I think is that tonight was a good example of even though Brown didn’t shoot the ball well, we were still able to win the basketball game,” Skinner said. “That’s where we came up a little short against Florida Gulf Coast last time we played. We did not consistently defend as well as needed, but tonight we defended consistently for 40 minutes regardless of what we were doing on the offensive end that’s really what allowed us to win the ballgame.”
KSU scored 21 points off of 20 turnovers while only turning the ball over 12 times. The Owls’ main key to victory, however, was arguably their success at the free-throw line. KSU scored 17 of its final 21 points at the charity stripe, shooting 21-24 for the game. At 87.4 percent, it marked the Owls’ highest free-throw percentage in A-Sun Conference play this season.
Clinging to a narrow 52-50 lead at the 8:21 mark in the second half, KSU used an 11-4 run to go up 63-54 with 2:41 left to play. Following a Lipscomb layup, the Owls outscored the Bisons 10-1 in the final two minutes to secure the victory.
KSU led Lipscomb 6-2 following a Bernard Morena layup with 18:41 to go in the opening half. The Bisons answered with a 12-4 run, taking a 6-point lead with 15 minutes remaining.
Trailing 23-18, the Owls used a pair of Kyle Clarke free throws followed by a Brown three-pointer in transition to tie the game at 23-apiece with 8:44 to go. Twice more the Bisons took a two-point lead, followed immediately by an answer from KSU to tie the game.
Knotted up at 27-27, Ray spouted off eight straight points to give the Owls a 35-27 advantage with 3:00 left to play in the first half. The Bisons closed out the half outscoring the Owls 9-4, taking a 39-36 deficit into the locker room.
The Owls led for the entirety of the second half, but never saw their lead grow larger than six points.
KSU will travel to Fort Myers, Florida to take on 4 seed Florida Gulf Coast in the opening round of the A-Sun Conference quarterfinals on Tuesday, March 1 at 7:05 p.m. The Eagles swept the Owls in the regular season, handing them a 79-74 loss in the Convocation Center on Jan. 26 and pulling out a 68-63 victory at home on Feb. 20.
Brown struggled offensively last time out against the Eagles, shooting 2-14 from the field, and the team as a whole was negatively affected. KSU will look for a big performance out of Brown in what will be his final conference tournament as an Owl. Additionally, the Owls have been outscored 27-14 in the points off of turnovers in the last two meetings despite FGCU’s slim 21-18 turnover margin. KSU will need to do all of the small things right, including capitalizing on turnovers, in order to pull out an upset victory and advance to the A-Sun semifinals.
Despite only accumulating 11 wins, the Owls closed out the regular season winning four of their final five games. This stretch included a win over 1 seed North Florida, 101-91, and 3 seed Jacksonville, 90-69. With the victories, KSU proved it can be a true threat in the conference tournament that should not be taken lightly, and the Owls will look to ride their momentum into Tuesday’s matchup with FGCU.
