Chants take second straight loss as Longwood rolls to big win

Coming off a tough loss to a Liberty team that had been previously winless against Division I competition this season, Coastal Carolina needed a strong response Saturday on the road against a similarly struggling Longwood squad.

And when the host Lancers then scored the final nine points of the first half to grab a lead, the Chanticleers needed to come back with one of their better halves of basketball to avoid back-to-back losses against two teams at the bottom of the Big South basketball standings.

The Chants had none of those answers on Saturday, only letting that deficit swell even larger after halftime as Longwood pulled away en route to a 76-61 win inside Willett Hall.

The Lancers (5-13, 1-4 Big South) earned their first win in five tries against Coastal Carolina since joining the conference, while the Chants (8-8, 2-4) have now put themselves at something of a crossroads in their season while falling further back in the league race.

“I’m not even worried about that,” Chants coach Cliff Ellis said of the standings. “Right now I’m just worried about how we’re playing, and right now we’re not confident, we’re making too many mistakes, we’re not playing hard enough. I’ve got to do a better job coaching. Every one of us are getting tested right now.”

Senior forward Badou Diagne had a game-high 21 points along with seven rebounds for Coastal Carolina and senior forward Marcus Freeman contributed 11 points and 11 rebounds off the bench, but the Chants shot just 32.3 percent for the game and a woeful 16.7 percent (4-of-24) from 3-point range.

It was an off game for two of the Chants’ top offensive players as junior guards Shivaughn Wiggins and Elijah Wilson combined to make just 1-of-18 shots from the field overall and 1-of-12 from 3-point range.

Longwood, meanwhile, played far better than its record, shooting 53.6 percent for the game with all five starters scoring in double figures, led by 17 points from Kanayo Obi-Rapu and 16 each from Shaquille Johnson and Tra’Vaughn White.

“It’s a big win anytime you beat a really, really good basketball team that’s well-coached and has had a lot of success,” Lancers coach Jayson Gee said. “This is the first time in my coaching tenure we’ve beaten Coastal, so it was certainly encouraging from that standpoint. I thought our kids really showed a lot of resiliency. We’ve had a lot of adversity, a lot of trials. For them to come out with that mindset, that attitude I think really speaks to their character. No question that’s definitely the best defensive game we’ve played.”

Coastal Carolina had used an 11-0 run midway through the first half to take a 17-10 lead, but Longwood would close the first half on a 12-1 run of its own, including the final nine points to surge into halftime with a 27-23 lead.

That momentum carried right through to the second half when the Lancers opened with a 12-2 run and later peaked their lead at 55-36 on a Lotanna Nwogbo dunk with about 10 and a half minutes remaining.

Longwood was without senior guard Leron Fisher, who was suspended by Gee and has missed the last three games, but the hosts had plenty of contributors Saturday. Darrion Allen, who came in averaging 9.1 points per game, scored nine of his 14 total points within the first five minutes of the second half to help the Lancers stretch their lead.

The Chants never would recover from that stretch.

They had one nice spurt during the final 10 minutes when they forced three straight turnovers on inbounds passes and used an 11-2 run – capped by a 3 from sophomore guard Jaylen Shaw – to make it a 10-point game at 57-47 with 6:43 remaining. They got within 10 again a couple more times as well but never any closer.

“We had a seven-point lead [in the first half], but in that process with a seven-point lead we were making some bad decisions and then the physicality of the game changed,” Ellis said. “They were very aggressive on the defensive side of the ball, they started making some shots and we just lost that leverage that we had. I didn’t think we were physical enough, I thought they wore us down, I didn’t like our decision making. Perhaps I needed to use the bench a little bit more. ...

“I thought we wore down somewhat, but not a way I want us to respond after a tough loss the other day because we didn’t play well. We turned it over too many times, we didn’t shoot the ball well, we played good defense in spurts and this was disappointing. I’ll be totally honest, this was disappointing – not the way I wanted us to handle it. We’ve got to go to the drawing board, we’ve got to get to practice, we’ve got a lot of tough games and we’ve got to try to manage it because it’s going to be a dogfight to do what we need to do.”

Said Diagne: “They [brought] the game to us. Especially at the beginning, we weren’t executing all of our plays and the defense let down a little bit the last eight minutes of the first half, and then the second half they just took the game to us.”

The most confounding part of the Chants’ recent play is that prior to this two-game skid against a pair of struggling teams they were coming off their best performance of the season in an 82-63 win over Big South contender Winthrop.

Now they have quite a bit of work to do if they hope to overcome this hole they’ve dug and climb back into the conference race.

“It is really frustrating, but if we take it a positive way it’s going to motivate us to go harder,” Diagne said.

Said Wiggins: “I’m not that concerned. I’m more concerned about the next game [against] Presbyterian, to try to go and get that one at home and try to get something going.”

This story was originally published January 9, 2016 at 5:51 PM with the headline "Chants take second straight loss as Longwood rolls to big win."