Tale of two halves
Pirates go ahead by 10 before Dukes recover, improve to 10-0 for the first time ever
HAMPTON — Hampton University fought hard Saturday but was unable to pull off a massive upset, falling 88-71 to No. 20 James Madison.
The game was a tale of two halves, with the Pirates controlling the first half and the Dukes dominating the second half before 2,068 at the HU Convocation
Center.
“Hampton was was ready to play,” JMU coach Mark Byington said. “First off, I want to give them credit and they have talent.
They’re putting it together, transfers this and that, and I know they’re just getting healthy and getting guys back, trying to figure out things. But what they did in the first half wasn’t unanticipated by us.”
Coming into the game, Joyner said it would take a complete game from the Pirates (4-6) to have a shot at winning, and that’s exactly what he got from his players in the first half.
“I think we’re trending towards where we want to go,” Joyner said. “To go out there and play the number 20 team in the country, you got to come play for 40 minutes. … I think we didn’t come play for 40, we came to play for a good 25, 27.”
Hampton came out of the gate hot and led by as many as 10 points. The Pirates ultimately led for 15 minutes in the first half and, despite yielding a 14-5 run to close the half, held a 42-41 lead heading into the intermission.
Joyner also stressed the importance that Hampton’s defense would play. JMU (10-0 for the first time in school history) entered the game as one of the most prolific scoring offenses in the country, averaging 94.1 points per game (No. 1 in the NCAA) and shooting 50.5% from the field (No. 17).
In the first half, Hampton limited JMU to 44.7% from the field. Hampton was able to force six turnovers in the first half and scored 10 points off those. The Pirates also tallied 21 total rebounds in the first half, 17 on the defensive glass.
“We were lethargic in the first half,” Byington said. “We had some things that go against you when you’re not playing hard. Foul trouble, turnovers, some different things. I thought the way we finished the first half was big, those last three minutes there, and the second half I thought we played our style of ball.”
The Dukes flipped the script in the second half, playing as advertised after a slow start. Byington said their run toward the end of the first half helped jump-start them in the second half.
“It was zero schematic changes,” Byington said. “I thought our effort and intensity was the change.”
What felt like a 3-point barrage from James Madison in the second half helped the Dukes take the lead and keep it. The Dukes, led by Williamsburg’s Xavier Brown, who scored 17 points, were 7 of 16 from beyond the arc in the second half compared to 5 of 16 in the first. Five other JMU players finished with double-digit points.
JMU also turned up its defensive pressure in the second half. The Dukes forced Hampton to turn the ball over 11 times in the second half, leading to 15 points for the Dukes. HU had just five first-half turnovers.
After shooting 50% from the field in the first half, Hampton shot just 36.7% in the second half.
“In the second half, we went on stretch where we made about four or five turnovers. Those four or five turnovers turned into three or four 3s,” Joyner said. “Which at that point, when you play against a team like that, they’re a well-oiled machine. So when you play like that and they start making some of those, the game changed on us right there.”
Freshman Jerry Deng led the Pirates in scoring for the second straight game. Fresh off a 37-point performance Monday, he finished with 18 points and six rebounds.
Hampton can only put so much stock in moral victories, but its first-half performance against a top-25 team can be evidence that once it all comes together, the Pirates could be in good shape.
“The game is starting to slow down for (Deng),” Joyner said. “So if it’s slowing down for him and it’s already slow for (Kyrese Mullen) and a couple of them, now we got to get the game to slow down for Jordan (Nesbitt) and slow down for Tedrick (Wilcox). Once we can mesh all that together, we felt like the sky’s the limit.”