High Point holds on for upset over Coastal Carolina

CONWAY With five games left in the regular season, the Coastal Carolina men’s basketball team finds itself facing a familiar issue and one the Chanticleers will have to overcome if they are going to make the kind of postseason push they have in mind.

For the second time in three days, the Chants faced a zone defense content to let them decide their fate from the perimeter, and for the second straight game they couldn’t get enough shots to fall.

High Point took the lead about midway through the first half Thursday night and never let it go on the way to a 70-65 win over Coastal inside Kimbel Arena.

It marks Coastal’s first back-to-back regular-season home losses since the 2008-09 season as the once streaking Chants now have to regroup with two and a half weeks remaining before the Big South Conference tournament.

“Well we didn’t bounce back from Tuesday’s loss,” CCU coach Cliff Ellis said. “It was a quick turnaround, and I really wanted us to come out the first five minutes and impose our will on them, but instead they imposed their will on us.”

Senior guard Shay Shine led that charge for High Point with a game-high 24 points, knocking down eight of 11 shots and four of his team’s 11 3-pointers. The Panthers (10-15, 6-9 Big South) came out hot from 3-point range and built a 33-25 halftime lead while knocking down 6 of 12 shots from beyond the arc in the first half.

The Chants (17-7, 10-4), meanwhile, struggled to find rhythm offensively most of the night and were down by as many as 11 points early in the second half before mounting a rally.

With the offense stalling, junior Kierre Greenwood -- normally a pass-first point guard -- took it upon himself to get Coastal going. He scored 13 of the Chants’ first 22 points after halftime and finished with a team-high 18 points with all of those coming in the second half.

“I was just taking what they gave me, just trying to be a spark and help my team get back in a position to win,” said Greenwood, who matched a season-high with 14 shots and went 4 of 7 from 3-point range after not making more than one 3 in any previous game this season.

And Coastal did make a game of it. After trailing 53-42, the Chants scored 10 straight points to draw to within a point. The noise inside Kimbel Arena was rising as Greenwood sliced through the lane for a layup, senior center Jon Pack converted a layup and foul shot and junior forward Sam McLaurin added a basket down low to make it a 53-52 game with 9:05 left to play.

But Coastal never could get over the hump as High Point quickly pushed its lead back to nine points.

“We kind of beat ourselves tonight,” Greenwood said. “We let them get off to a good start, they [were] feeling it, and when you’re playing a team like that, you can’t let them catch rhythm early.”

As for the Chants, they had one of their poorest shooting performances of the season, finishing 40.3 percent from the field and just 7 of 26 from 3-point range. They also struggled from the outside Tuesday night in an 81-76 loss to Campbell.

Senior forward Chris Gradnigo added 15 points and nine rebounds in the loss, while McLaurin finished with 12 points and six boards and Pack had nine points and eight rebounds.

“What we were really trying to do was just protect the high post and not allow them to drive the ball in the paint,” High Point coach Scott Cherry said. “We looked at the numbers, and they shoot 50 percent from the field and they shoot 31 or 32 [percent] from the 3. So math says they shoot ... a high percentage [inside the arc], and a lot of them come from driving the ball right to the paint and getting it inside.

“Kierre does a great job getting inside and kicking off to shooters and dumping off to his bigs, and we just tried to do our best job of keeping them on the perimeter and forcing them to try to shoot shots. And fortunately tonight the percentages worked for us.”

That was a defensive approach the Chants faced earlier in the season during another trying stretch for the team, and one they might expect to see more the rest of the year.

“[It was] the same thing that Campbell did. [They] zoned us the entire game. They packed it in, and we didn’t knock down shots,” Ellis said. “We’ve seen that before. We came back and managed it a few games ago, but the last two games have been kind of like early in the season when it comes to the zone. We haven’t knocked down the shots that we’ve needed to knock down.”

With the back-to-back defeats, the Chants have now lost more games than they did all of last season and will try to regroup as they visit Winthrop on Saturday for their third game in five days.

“We’ve just got to respond back on Saturday,” junior guard Anthony Raffa said. “We’ve got another game on Saturday. We can’t hold our heads -- the game’s over with. We’ve got to move on to Winthrop.”

NOTES: Junior starter Danny Nieman sustained a hip pointer Thursday night, Ellis said, and was limited to six minutes in the second half. His status for Saturday is uncertain.

“We’ll have to see, but [a] hip pointer in that situation is not a good sign for Saturday,” Ellis said.