By MONTE DUTTON
Good news from Timmons Arena: Furman is Furman again.
The Paladins emerged from their shooting funk with a vengeance against The Citadel, an ancestral Southern Conference rival, and banished the Bulldogs, 82-68, in front of a Wednesday-night Timmons Arena crowd of 2,037.
The Paladins, led by an obviously recovered Alex Williams, made liberal use of that old pal, the swishing basketball. Furman (7-9, 1-2 SoCon) shot a season-best .550 (33/60) from the field and .419 (13/31) from the magical three-point land that dreams are made of.
Williams, junior product of Xenia, Ohio, wasn’t discouraged by a 1/11 three-point performance on Saturday in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was returning from a knee injury.
On the home floor, in front of home folks, Williams squeezed 26 points out of 7/9 triples and just 2/6 from more reasonable distances. He got his knee back, his groove back and recovered fully from a brief bout of three-point amnesia.
“It was just going back to our identity plan,” Williams said. “Sharing the ball, always getting a good shot and passing it up for a great shot. I think guys have just bought into that, and you can see it’s working.”
Wednesday night, that is.
Let’s go back.
On Tuesday night, with local high-school basketball games inexplicably rained out, I watched most of the South Carolina-Alabama game. I thought, Gee, both teams are putting up shots from outside the line arcing around both ends of the court, and get this. Many of them are going in.
I had forgotten what this looked like. After a while, it got more and more familiar. Later I dreamed of that sound a basketball makes when it lands perfectly in the bottom of a net from long range.
I dreamed of Paladins.
In triples, which, by the way, are not normally unfamiliar to the Bulldogs, Furman outscored them by 30 points. The Citadel (8-8, 0-3) tried only three more than the Paladins hit. The Bulldogs hit 3/16. Elijah Morgan, who scored 15 points, buried none of his seven such tries.
Garrett Hien scored 11 points and the trio of PJay Smith, J.P. Pegues and Ben Vander Wal added 10 apiece.
Vander Wal praised teammate Pegues, spiffy as usual with 10 points, six assists and four rebounds.
“Our defense has been progressively getting better each game,” Vander Wal said. “We still have a long way to go. Tonight was a great step in that direction. J.P. is gonna play defense every time.
“He’s just a warrior. He’s a dog. Just seeing the way he plays … we just all feed off that. We talk to each other on the court. We’re just a lot more energetic.”
Williams’ virtuosity was just one example of the sublime. Carter Whitt only scored five points but instigated others with 10 assists for the second time this season. Out of 33 Furman field goals, 28 were assisted.
Furman (7-9, 1-2 SoCon) buried seven of its first eight shots, including its first four three-point tries, to build a 19-11 lead. Williams poured in 16 points in the opening half to help the Paladins to a 44-36 lead at the break.
There were oddities.
On an otherwise lovely shooting night, the Paladins canned only three of eight free throws. On a night in which eight players grabbed rebounds, the only player who didn’t was the tallest, Cooper Bowser. In fairness, the 6-11 freshman slammed his only shot and only played a minute, 57 seconds. Furman’s bench outscored The Citadel’s, 23-2.
The Citadel engineered a 10-point rally during just past the middle of the first half and trailed by only eight at halftime. Guard Madison Durr led the Bulldogs with 17 points, followed by Morgan, Quentin Millora-Brown with 14 (and 13 rebounds) and A.J. Smith with 11.
While the Bulldogs were shooting .188 from the outer reaches, they were hitting .595 from inside the pesky arc.
At the same time, Furman lost the shooting willies. When the game began, the Paladins had hoisted up 111 three balls and found the nets on 18 of them in the previous four.
Now you don’t. Now you see it. It’s supposed to be vice-versa.
The first SoCon triumph ended a three-game losing streak.
“At the end of the day, we all have to accept responsibility for this, and we have to go fix it,” head coach Bob Richey said. “The way we have to fix it. … How is that we lost our identity and how do we get back to it?”
Richey showed the team the video of Saturday’s 73-58 loss at Chattanooga and interspersed it with footage of the Paladins’ victory there a season ago.
“We came in here Monday and took both games and we just went clip one, clip one, clip two, clip two … and we just let them watch it … hey, what do you see here? It was a jaw-dropping moment for everybody in the program, even staff.”
“We went through our hiccups,” Williams said. “We got away from our identity. Tonight we got back to playing Furman basketball, and that’s moving the ball.”
The Citadel trimmed the margin to 48-45 in the first four minutes of the second half, but Furman fashioned a 20-6 run, highlighted by a pair of Williams threes, to push the lead to 68-51 with 9:09 remaining. The Bulldogs got no closer than 13 points the rest of the night.
The victory marked Furman’s 14th in the last 16 meetings versus The Citadel and its ninth straight over the Bulldogs at Timmons Arena.
East Tennessee State (9-7, 1-2) comes to town on Saturday at 2 p.m.
Take a look at the stats here.
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