‘Fresh’ lineup lifts Danes

Freshman starting five helps trigger road victory

It’s too early to be calling them the Fab Five, but the five freshmen who were in the University at Albany basketball starting lineup Thursday night made a pretty good first impression.

Malachi de Sousa made his first career start, giving Ualbany five firstyear players on the court for its America East game at Stony Brook.

Two of them, Cameron Healy and Antonio Rizzuto, combined for nine 3-pointers and 42 points as the Great Danes knocked off the conference’s second-place team 74-70 in front of 3,210 at the Island Federal Arena.

A side effect of the move is that it gave Ualbany (10-18, 5-7) more experience and production off the bench. The Danes got 28 points from their reserves, their highest total against a Division I opponent this season.

Junior guard Ahmad Clark, who was benched in favor of de Sousa, still played 27 minutes. He was one of three Danes who had started every game.

“I hold all our guys to a high stan-

dard,” Ualbany coach Will Brown said in his postgame radio interview. “Ahmad needs to raise his level overall. That was my main reason. Ahmad handled it well, Malachi handled it well.”

The Fab Five was a label worn by the 1991 Michigan allfreshmen lineup. The Danes had started four freshmen — Healy, Rizzuto, Adam Lulka and Brent Hank — for the past 14 games.

De Sousa did not score, but he played a season-high 21 minutes, supplying three assists and three blocked shots. The Danes, who entered the game with only 49 blocked shots to their opponents’ 106, had a season-high seven.

“Malachi de Sousa was good defensively for us,” Brown said.

Clark contributed six points and six rebounds, and sophomore Sasha French, seeing his most court time since Dec. 18, played seven effective minutes.

The biggest story off the bench was Kendall Lauderdale, a junior college transfer who had his first double-figure scoring game with 17 points and grabbed nine rebounds. Ualbany lost the battle of the boards to Stony Brook, the America East’s best rebounding team, by only one.

“What I liked about today is he was tough,” Brown said. “They kept putting three, four different guys on him, and he kept going to work down there. I was more impressed how he did defensively. That’s been the biggest hurdle for him, understanding what we do and helping us defensively.”

Lauderdale’s contribution was necessary when Lulka, coming off conference Rookie of the Week honors, was saddled with foul trouble. Lulka fouled out in seven minutes with career lows of three points and zero rebounds.

Ualbany, which led for 35 minutes, 10 seconds (to Stony Brook’s 1:49), was sparked early by Healy, who had 11 of his team’s first 14 points. He finished with 24, moving him ahead of Clark for the team scoring lead.

Rizzuto had all 18 of his points in the second half, including 14 straight at one point.

“We played with great poise when we had opportunities not to,” Brown said. “Stony Brook made some runs at us, and we looked them right in the eye and made a run right back at them.”

For Stony Brook (21-6, 12-3), which lost a chance to move into a tie with Vermont atop the conference standings, Akwasi Yeboah had 22 points and 12 rebounds. He was 9-for-14 from the field, including 3-for-5 from 3-point range.

The rest of the Seawolves were 19-for-51 (37.3 percent) and 3-for-16 (18.8 percent) from outside the arc.

“We let a great opportunity slip out of our hands,” Stony Brook coach Jeff Boals said. “Give Albany a lot of credit. The first four minutes set the tone for the game. We’d tie it, go down one, down two, but just couldn’t get the stops we needed to get a lead and build on it.”