Winthrop basketball takes wind out of Gore Arena, downs Campbell in Big South matchup
In front of a crowd booing in disgust in Gore Arena, Campbell’s Milos Stajcic trudged toward his team’s bench.
The starting sophomore center from Serbia, who only played six minutes Saturday, had fouled out. He looked back at the reporting official in confusion and contempt, clapped his coach’s hand and found a seat on the bench.
Campbell turned the ball over on its ensuing possession, which led to a Chandler Vaudrin run out, a Vaudrin two-handed dunk and a Vaudrin roar for Winthrop. The Eagles (8-7, 2-0 Big South) rode their momentum to their second Big South victory in as many tries — an 87-72 win over the Camels (9-5, 0-2).
“That’s not really my thing,” Vaudrin told The Herald postgame of his dunk. “My knee has been bothering me all year long, so I’m like, two points is two points. I usually don’t dunk it. But my teammates are always on me, like in layup lines, so when I got the fast break, I was like, ‘Why not? Let’s do it.’
“And I knew if I had made it, then they would go wild.”
The bench did, in fact, go wild — and the play, in effect, seemed to suck the energy out of the orange-shaded gymnasium.
“I would say it’s the best energy we’ve brought,” redshirt freshman DJ Burns said of his team’s performance. “We hit shots tonight, but there are some games that we’ve really been on, and we had some moments at the end where we let up, and that’s something we can’t do going forward.
“But other than that, yeah, it was one of the best games we’ve had this year.”
Winthrop’s afternoon started with a prolific first half. The team scored 48 points — its most against any Division I opponent this season, and its second-most behind the total it put up against Pfeiffer.
A likely cause? Both teams pressed for most of the first half, which upped the game’s tempo.
Winthrop possessions in the first half were largely formulaic: The Eagles used a two-guard front to break the 3-2 Camel press, and once they’d cross halfcourt, they’d usually have a numbers advantage. And that’s when they’d hear their head coach scream from the sideline: “Attack!”
There were open threes, open layups — and on occasion, when the Eagles were able to run a set, there were postup opportunities. Vaudrin notched five assists in the opening period. Jamal King hit two of Winthrop’s four first-half threes, and Winthrop only gave up five turnovers.
Burns led the Eagles in the first half with 10 points, including a bucket toward the end of the half that made even the Camel-faithful gasp in admiration: Burns caught a pass near the left block, took a drop step and flushed it through the net.
“Before the game, I was watching film, and I was like, ‘Every time, they just force me to go right, so I might as well turn around and try to dunk it once and see what happens,’” Burns said. “And it actually worked. I was so happy.”
Winthrop entered the break up, 48-38.
In the second half, Winthrop didn’t let up. The team only hit four more threes, but it still scored 39 points. The team was led by Burns, who was an efficient 7-for-11 from the field with 15 points, and Vaudrin, who ended with 16 points, eight assists and seven rebounds in 35 minutes. Vaudrin, in particular, has hit a stride just when his team has needed him to, with freshman guard Russell Jones still out with an ankle injury he sustained in late November.
The Camels shot 51.1 percent from the field — but their good shooting was diluted by their 18 turnovers and overshadowed by Winthrop’s 58.5 percent shooting from the floor.
“Early on, we were playing one of the best nonconference schedules in the country,” Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey said after the game. “And we didn’t win them all. It would have been easy for us to hang our heads, feel sorry for ourselves, let it affect us. But we didn’t. Guys really stayed committed to practicing and preparing the right way.
“And here, as we’ve gone into conference play, we’ve gotten off to a good start.”
Notable: Chase Claxton ‘emptied the stinkin’ tank’
When asked who affected this game in a way that wasn’t reflected on the stat sheet, Burns clapped his hands, smiled and offered a response that the rest of his team agreed with postgame.
“Chase Claxton,” he said. “My boy does his thing every game. He brings consistent energy 100 percent of the time, and we couldn’t ask anything more from him.”
Claxton put together an unheralded statline on Saturday: He missed all four of his free-throw tries, was only 1 of 2 from the field with two points and only had two total rebounds — but he was the difference in the game, according to Kelsey.
“I think a big thing in this game, and this was a little thing and it might not have had a big effect, but I really think it did,” Kelsey said. “We really challenged our guys at halftime because our offensive rebounding percentage was below our goal. We always want to get 33 percent of our missed shots ...
“I felt like there wasn’t a relentlessness going after the ball. I felt like our deflection total in the last eight minutes of the first half really waned.”
Kelsey said Claxton took his halftime challenge to heart — and that his ability to work hard, in of itself, is “a talent.”
“I’m going to tell you right now, Chase Claxton emptied the stinkin’ tank during his minutes in the second half,” Kelsey said. “You look at his line, there ain’t nothing on there that’s pretty. … But he affected the game with his energy.”
Some additions from Claxton that didn’t end up in the final stat-line included taking charges — he took two Saturday, and has used this skill to become a deceptively good defender, despite normally being outsized — and diving on the floor.
“I can’t tell you how many times they’re throwing entry passes into the post, and Chase is diving over top to try to steal the entry pass,” Vaudrin said. “He doesn’t have stats that get noticed, like you just said, but he plays so hard that he’s such a key piece for us.”
Quotable: ‘Words will not come out’
More on Claxton from Burns: “He’s so locked in, words will not come out. We just give him a little spark, trying to make him smile.”
Kelsey on his team’s schedule for the rest of the weekend: “Our guys are going to have a good off day [Sunday], recover. It’s a much-needed off day [Sunday] for those guys. We’ve gone really hard. We went really hard when we got back from Christmas. … We had Longwood and then a quick turnaround with this, so guys will recover, and get back after it against High Point on Wednesday.”
This story was originally published January 4, 2020 at 6:20 PM.
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