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Princeton University Athletics
Princeton University
Wagner
Players Mentioned
Men's Basketball Wins at Wagner 69-57
December 18, 2010 | Men's Basketball
There was no need for Princeton (8-3) to rally back from a double-digit deficit as it had a year ago in the meeting in Jadwin Gym, when the Seahawks (4-6) were ahead 36-24 with little more than 10 minutes to go in the game.
In the rematch, which brought Princeton to Wagner's Staten Island campus for the first time, the Seahawks led only by as much as four, doing so before the game was 10 minutes old.
Kareem Maddox led the Tigers with 23 points, following up his 31-point game at Tulsa last Sunday. Brendan Connolly had a career-high 10 points as one of four players in double figures, along with Maddox, Dan Mavraides (12) and Patrick Saunders (11).
"I think tonight's 40 minutes was probably as good as it has been," Sydney Johnson, the Franklin C. Cappon, Edward G. Green '40 head coach of men's basketball said. "We've won some games, but our performance from jump ball to the end has really been inconsistent. That doesn't sit well. We're trying to put 40 minutes of good basketball together and I thought tonight was pretty solid."
Wagner suffered just its second double-digit loss of the season and first since a 15-point defeat at Lehigh more than a month ago on Nov. 15. Naofall Folahan led the Seahawks with 19 points on 6-of-8 shooting against the Tigers.
That the halftime score in Friday night's game was the same score as the 11-minute mark of the second half a year earlier is a factor of Princeton's raising the tempo in the new season. The Tigers reached the 60-point mark for the 11th straight game, the longest such stretch in a single season since 1972.
Princeton's defense staked the team to an early lead that it never surrendered. Wagner had one field goal during a span of greater than seven minutes in the first half that ended with 1:27 before the break. Prior to that last bucket, a layup by Wagner's Folahan, Princeton went on a 15-2 run to take its then-largest lead at 35-20.
"This was very much like a league game, the way we're going to be challenged," Johnson said. "We're not always going to be playing with the lead, but we have to just be able to manage the fact that teams are going to go on a run, and when they're in their home gym, they're going to feel a little bit better about themselves."
Princeton shot 48.3% before the break, making 14 of 29 from the field while canning 2 of 4 from beyond the arc. That bettered Wagner's 36.4% clip, making 8 of 22 and just 1 of 4 from distance.
After the break, Princeton led by as much as 18 on a Connolly bucket with 9:12 to go, and Wagner cut the lead to single digits only once, with 5:56 to go. That lasted less than a minute before the Tigers answered with a 7-0 run to put the game away. Princeton made 11 of 17 (64.7%) attempts from the field in the second half.
"I think we had an intensity that hasn't been there in the second half previously this season," Maddox said. "We really wanted to make it a point to come out and play really, very, very hard because we can't have teams going on runs, especially when we're playing these away games. I think we did a pretty good job of that."
For the game, Princeton shot 54.3%, making 25 of 46 for its second-best field goal percentage of the season after a 61.2% effort at Lafayette on Nov. 30. Wagner shot 38.6%, making 17 of 44. Princeton broke a five-game string in which it lost on the glass, outrebounding Wagner 32-23 with Saunders grabbing a game-high six boards.