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BOSTON - Northeastern coach Bill Coen didn't exactly make a major revelation when analyzing last night's game against Drexel.
"We all know shooting comes and goes, but defense wins basketball games," Coen said after the Dragons rallied from 17 points down for a 68-59 victory in the Colonial Athletic Association game. "But you're not going to find a better defensive team than Drexel in this conference."
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That was particularly true in the second half (which began with Northeastern leading, 33-26) when a combination of Drexel's fullcourt pressure and halfcourt, man-to-man defense eventually ground the Huskies (7-15, 5-6 CAA) into the Matthews Arena floor.
Drexel (16-5, 8-3) scored 16 points off nine Northeastern turnovers in the second half - with three turnovers coming during a 12-0 run that gave the Dragons a 51-44 lead.
Frank Elegar, who played only 11 minutes and scored two points in the first half after picking up his second foul, finished with a team-high 16 points. Dominick Mejia added 12 and Bashir Mason 11, and Tramayne Hawthorne chipped in 10 off the bench. Elegar played after being suspended by the league for Saturday's loss to Virginia Commonwealth for unsportsmanlike conduct in an earlier game.
"Our scoring goes up, the bench gets deeper, and we have an extra player out there," Hawthorne said of the importance of having Elegar in the lineup. "It feels good when you know you have a nice inside presence when you're out there. But we knew we were coming into a dogfight. They're 7-1 at home coming into this game, so we knew we had to keep buckling down and grind one out."
Drexel started "grinding it out" near the end of the first half, when Hawthorne buried back-to-back three-point shots that helped reduce the Dragons' deficit from 25-8 to 33-26 at intermission.
During intermission, coach Bruiser Flint made his displeasure about his team's first-half performance known.
"I just told them to pick it up . . . you know how I am," Flint said. "I told them we've got to play with more energy. I didn't think we played with any energy in the first half. But what we did was we wore them down."
Drexel's ability to trap Northeastern's ballhandlers led to turnovers that disrupted the Huskies' offense and enabled the Dragons to score in transition.
"Our trap enabled us to get some easy baskets," Flint said. "And I thought [guards] Matt Janning and Bobby Kelly got a little tired."
Janning definitely wasn't as effective in the second half as in the first, when he scored 14 of his 18 points.
In fact, Janning scored eight consecutive points in the first 6 minutes.
"We started picking it up a little bit more [in the second half], and, like I said, we started wearing them down," Flint added.
"I felt good when they started having [forward] Bennet Davis bring the ball up, because that played into what we what we wanted them to do."
Noteworthy
Drexel will fly to Omaha, Neb., for an ESPN BracketBusters game against Creighton on Feb. 17. Times are still to be determined for all games. *
