While the final score would beg to differ, there were many things the SIU men’s basketball team did well in their 93-68 loss to the 21st ranked Florida Gators.
The Dawgs had one of their best nights of the season on the boards, collecting 49 rebounds, including 20 on the offensive glass. Freshman Rolyns Aligbe led SIU with 10, while 6’1” guard Elijah Elliott had 8.
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SIU also had several spurts of good defense, including forcing a five minute stretch of scoreless basketball for the Gators midway through the first half. Florida, who averages 87.2 points per game, had scored less than 21 points over 12 minutes into the first half,.
The killer for the Salukis was Florida’s five minute, 22-2 run, which opened up the gap in scoring. The Gators were fueled during the run by hot shooting from beyond the arc combined with six backbreaking SIU turnovers.
Head coach Scott Nagy was critical of the Dawgs’ performance in the first half, saying “we just didn’t’ have any fight in the first half” and saying that there were “several opportunities for us to make plays and we didn’t make them.”
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Nagy also pointed to the second half as an example of how SIU should be playing all the time, citing their 14 offensive rebounds as evidence of the teams’ ability to play hard.
“What are we waiting for,” Nagy said. “Why is it taking so long for those things to happen? That’s the kind of team we have to be if we want to win.”
If the game were played only in the second half, the Salukis would have fared much better. They stuck nearly point-for-point with Florida and were only outscored by four points, making the halftime deficit even more painful knowing that they could hang with a top-25 team.
The beginning of the second half also saw Elliott exit the game due to injury. Elliott, who is SIU’s leading scorer at 16.5 points per game, did not return.
“We’ve gotta play a 40 minute game,” Nagy said. “We’re in all these games, we’re in them, and then there’s this point where… we fall apart.
This brought Nagy back to the same question.
“Why does it take us being down 21 to then, ‘OK, now we’ll play hard,’” Nagy said. “I told them we’re at the point of the season where we can’t just beat them up in practice, it’s gotta be recognized that immediately when the ball goes up, that’s how hard we gotta play to start the game.”
Ali Dibba once again had a strong scoring performance, going 7-15 from the field and putting up 17 points. While Jarrett Hensley had his highest-scoring game of the season with 14, it was an otherwise rough day for the Salukis on offense, as they shot 34.3% from the field and 72.2% from the line on 13 of18 attempts.
Though Davion Sykes and Drew Steffe, both of whom played off the bench, each had two assists, the bench had an especially lackluster day in the scoring category. As a group, they shot 5-27 and accounted for only 15 points in the entire game.
SIU’s next game will also be in Florida, as the Dawgs will play Louisiana Tech as part of the Gulf Coast Showcase on Nov. 25 at 2 p.m.
Sports consultant Ryan Grieser can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date on all your southern Illinois news, be sure to follow The Daily Egyptian on Facebook on X @dailyegyptian.
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