Men's Basketball Wins Ninth Straight at Le Moyne
SYRACUSE, NY - Without a loss since November 24, the Merrimack
men's basketball team has recorded nine consecutive wins on
the season with an 83-68 win at Le Moyne College Tuesday evening.
The program record for consecutive wins in a season at Merrimack
is 13 when Frank T. Monahan coached the Warriors to a 23-6 record
in 1977-78.
The Warriors improved to 10-3 overall and 8-2 in Northeast-10
Conference play with the win, good for second behind the
Conference's outright leader, Stonehill College (12-3, 9-1 NE-10).
With a career-high seven three pointers, senior captain
Darren
Duncan (Briarwood, NY) led all scorers with 29 points,
while junior Dee Mency (Hagerstown,
MD) drained four threes of his own to score 20 in the
game.
1st
Half
Merrimack used a pair of Duncan threes and two Aaron Strothers
(Wareham, MA) lay-ins to grab a quick 10-2 lead on the
road, but an ensuing 10-0 run from the Dolphins led to the only Le
Moyne lead in the game at the 14:10 mark of the first half.
Helping the Warriors shoot 94% from the line (15-of-16), Duncan
and Mency combined for 5-of-5 in the waning moments of the first
half to build a 40-32 halftime lead.
Despite 14 first half points from Laurence Ekperigin, the
reigning Northeast-10 Conference Player of the Year, Merrimack used
an 8-3 bench scoring advantage to gain an early advantage.
Ekperigin scored 23 points in the game and grabbed 14 boards.
2nd
Half
Merrimack started the second half with an 18-5 run that began
with a pair of threes from Duncan and ended with a pair of triples
from Mency.
Le Moyne would pull to within 12 points at 8:39 mark, but
Merrimack pushed the lead to as much as 21 at 3:41 with Duncan's
sixth three-pointer of the game. Ducan would later connect on
his seventh with less than two minutes to play to ice the contest.
Improving to 7-0 when scoring at least 80 points, the Warriors
scored 11 points off turnovers to win their program record-tying
ninth straight.
"We certainly shot well and Darren had a great night," said head
coach Bert Hammel following his Warriors' tenth
win of the season. "It was good to see our defense play the
way they did against a talented team with a considerable post
presence."
The Dolphins not only out-rebounded the Warriors 29-26, but held
a 42-24 advantage in the paint. The Warriors 14
three-pointers proved to be the deciding factor in the end as
Merrimack shot a blistering 52% (14-of-27) from beyond the arc.
Looking for a tenth straight win on Saturday, the Warriors
return to action at home against Adelphi University for a 3:00pm
tip-off against the Panthers who lead the Northeast-10 with 14 wins
(7-3 NE-10), but have dropped the previous two outings to Saint
Anselm and UMass-Lowell.
