Chanticleers finish strong for pivotal win on Senior Night

After watching his Coastal Carolina men’s basketball team rally back from an eight-point halftime deficit to roll past Charleston Southern on Thursday night, coach Cliff Ellis was asking for other scores from around the conference and trying to sort out the potential seeding scenarios for the Big South tournament next week.

At the very least, the Chanticleers now know they won’t have to play until the quarterfinals next Friday as they clinched a top-five seed and first-round bye with their 68-60 win over the Buccaneers on Senior Night inside The HTC Center.

And regardless of what seed they do eventually end up with, Ellis was feeling pretty pleased with how his team is playing heading into its regular-season finale Saturday.

“I can’t say enough about this team. With all that they’ve gone through, to come in and just keep fighting and find ways, it really speaks a lot of their character,” Ellis said. “And I’m glad that we won for the seniors, because they’re the leaders and they helped make this happen. But it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, our guys will fight, dig, scratch, claw and they’ve been through a lot.”

The team’s injury-riddled season continued as senior forward Badou Diagne was sidelined with a strained ligament in his foot, but junior point guard Shivaughn Wiggins contributed a game-high 18 points and six assists, sophomore guard Jaylen Shaw hit some big shots down the stretch while scoring all 10 of his points after halftime and senior forward Tristian Curtis added eight points and 13 rebounds as the Chants improved to 17-10 overall and 11-6 in the Big South.

Charleston Southern (9-20, 5-13), meanwhile, has now lost nine of its last 10 games and struggled down the stretch Thursday night after building a 37-29 lead at halftime.

The visitors didn’t score their first point of the second half until 9 minutes, 11 seconds had come off the clock while the Chants went on an 14-0 run in the meanwhile to seize the lead.

Ellis was waving his arms on the sideline throughout the second half while trying to bring the crowd of 2,514 to its feet, and the fans responded by booing loudly at foul calls they didn’t like and helping to steal the momentum of the game while reverberating as the Chants hit big shot after big shot down the stretch.

“In the first half we felt we were trying to do too much one-on-one, taking our guy off the dribble the first side of the floor and we like to get to the second and third side to make their defense have to guard us longer. We were settling early on in the game,” Wiggins said.

The second half was a much different story.

When Charleston Southern did final hit a shot to cut Coastal Carolina’s lead to 43-40 midway through the half, freshman forward Kevin Holmes Jr. answered back with 3-pointers on consecutive possessions – after hitting only 6-of-26 3-point tries previously this season.

“Man, he gave us a boost. Those were some big shots that he had,” Ellis said.

Meanwhile, Shaw scored all 10 of his points in the final nine minutes. He followed Holmes’ back-to-back 3s with a mid-range jumper and later a fastbreak layup to push the lead to 53-42.

When the Bucs later trimmed it to 56-50, Shaw dropped in a timely 3. When the lead narrowed to four, Wiggins connected on a high-arching jumper to keep the margin comfortable. And a few possessions later Shaw drained another 3 to make it 64-57 with 1:48 remaining.

“These guys just keep me up. They don’t let me get down,” Shaw said. “They just tell me they need me in the game and I’m important for them. I just try to keep my head in it, don’t get down and just keep shooting.”

The game wouldn’t get any closer than five points the rest of the way as the Chants closed out their ninth win in their last 11 games.

“I’m happy for our seniors. What a tremendous effort, gutty effort, gutty performance,” Ellis said. “The first half we couldn’t buy a basket. They were hitting 50 percent and they were knocking shots down; we weren’t. The second half, totally different picture. We started sharing the ball better and it opened up some good shots and we made some shots. Our defense dug in. ... It was just a good team effort and a very good second half, and I’m just proud that we sent our seniors out the right way.”

The Chants honored four seniors Thursday night in Curtis, forward Marcus Freeman, guard Aaron Law (who made his first career start) and Diagne.

Curtis received a pleasant surprise just before the game when he saw that his mother had come from his native Bahamas to watch his final home game.

“It was awesome,” he said. “She showed up out of nowhere, I had no idea, so I was real emotional to begin with. ... I saw her literally when I walked out of the lockerroom to walk out to Senior Night. It was real special and it’s touching.”

Coastal Carolina closes out the regular-season Saturday at UNC Asheville while looking to maximize its seeding for the Big South tournament next week in Buies Creek, N.C. With league-leading Winthrop and High Point playing a late game Thursday night, the Chants still had a chance to finish anywhere from first to fifth as Ellis was sizing up the scenarios after the win.

For their part, though, the players didn’t seem too worried about how it all shakes out.

“We weren’t really worried about standings or anything like that,” Curtis said. “We just want to take it one possession at a time, one game at a time and however it plays out it plays out. And thank God it played out in our favor tonight.”

NOTES: Ellis said Diagne, the Chants’ top offensive forward and leading rebounder, will not make the trip to Asheville, N.C., and will instead stay home to receive treatment on the strained ligament in his foot. It’s unknown at this point what his availability or effectiveness will be for the tournament next week.

“We’ll just try to get him ready and hope we can get some time out of him next week,” Ellis said. “It’s so unfortunate, I hate that here on senior night – as much as he’s gone through – that he wasn’t able to go. It’s just gut-wrenching, but he’s with us in spirit and our guys really stepped up for him tonight.”

This story was originally published February 25, 2016 at 10:47 PM with the headline "Chanticleers finish strong for pivotal win on Senior Night."