Herd dominates Monarchs to split series
NORFOLK — For the second straight night Saturday, Old Dominion staked its opponent to a large lead and tried to climb back.
This time, the hill proved far too steep.
Andrew Taylor and Jarrod West both scored 18 points, and Marshall nearly led wire to wire in an easy 87-67 win over the weary and shorthanded Monarchs at Chartway Arena.
With the victory, the Thundering Herd (10-5, 4-4 Conference USA) salvaged a split of the two-game series.
ODU (9-5, 5-3), playing without two of its best players and perhaps still feeling the effects of a lengthy COVID-19 shutdown, fell behind by 22 before halftime and never had much of a chance.
Marshall shot 52.4% from the field and made 13 of 27 from 3-point range to keep the chilly Monarchs at bay. ODU shot 35.5% and made just 3 of 21 from long range.
“I can’t put my finger on it and I can’t tell you exactly why or what ‘it’ is, but we didn’t have ‘it,’ “said Monarchs coach Jeff Jones. “The energy, the activity, the aggressiveness, we didn’t have that. And with Marshall playing as well as they were, it became obvious that it wasn’t our night.”
Austin Trice scored 16 points for ODU, which trailed by as many as 34 points midway through the second half.
In Friday’s series opener, the Monarchs overcame a 21-point deficit in the second half to prevail 82-81. Trice scored 20 points in that game, ODU’s first since a COVID outbreak within the program shut down all basketball activity on Jan. 21.
The Monarchs trailed 42-28 at halftime Friday before shooting 65.7% from the floor in the second half.
Saturday brought no such turnaround, though ODU did close the gap down the stretch by scoring 27 of the game’s final 40 points.
The difference in the two nights, Monarchs junior forward Joe Reece said, was effort and mental toughness.
“I felt like they threw the first punch, and when they did, we just kind of fell short a little bit and we just kind of just put our heads down off the first punch,” said Reece, who scored 13 points. “And we didn’t kind of come back from that.
“They hit us in the mouth, and we kind of backed up a little bit.”
To be fair, ODU guards A.J. Oliver and Malik Curry, the Monarchs’ leading scorer with 16.5 points per game, were “unavailable” for unspecified reasons, a school spokesman said. Neither played in Friday’s game.
The Monarchs were down to eight available players, many of whom aren’t normally on the court together.
That, Jones said, is no excuse. “We want to win, we want to compete, and we want to be the best that we can be. And that doesn’t change,” he said. “We talked to our team about the fact that nobody’s going to feel sorry for us, and we certainly shouldn’t. We had to figure out a way to compete. We did that last night, and we didn’t do it today.”
After an initial positive COVID test within the program halted team activities, Jones said “several” players and staff members subsequently tested positive. Under privacy laws, ODU cannot identify the personnel affected.
Saturday’s game went sideways for the Monarchs pretty quickly. The Herd shot 60% from the floor and made 8 of 14 from 3-point range in the first half to take a 48-30 lead into halftime. ODU didn’t help itself by shooting 35.5% and making just 1 of 8 from long range.
Reece, a 6-foot-8 St. Louis native, said the Monarchs need to work on playing together consistently, regardless of who’s available.
“Basketball is a team sport — 80% mental, 20% physical is what my dad used to say,” Reece said. “But most importantly, it’s a collective thing, and once we all figure out that we all need each other to be successful, we’ll be a very, very good program. We have our moments and we have spurts in which we do that, but naturally, we have a lot more work to do.”
The Monarchs have a more conventional home-and-home series against Charlotte this week, with a road game Wednesday and a home game Saturday.
Whether Oliver and Curry will be back by then remains to be seen.
“We’ll keep our fingers crossed,” Jones said.