Slowly, quietly, Winthrop goes on huge second half run to remain unbeaten in Big South
The run didn’t come out of nowhere.
It wasn’t an explosion. It wasn’t a string of steals by Russell Jones Jr., or a barrage of threes from Hunter Hale. There was a Josh Ferguson dunk, but it didn’t punctuate any sort of unexpected burst from the Winthrop Eagles (13-7, 7-0 Big South) — who, with the 79-53 win over USC Upstate on Thursday night, extended their winning streak to nine games and remained the only unbeaten team in the conference.
No. This one was a slow burn.
After nearly 23 minutes of basketball, the score was tied at 38. The two teams entered the break tied at 34 — the Eagles not ever holding a lead more than seven points.
But then, with under 18 minutes left, Winthrop started scoring — and USC Upstate stopped. The Eagles went on a 13-0 run. There was a stretch in the second half where the Spartans didn’t score a point in nearly six minutes.
“That’s what’s special about this team,” said Jones Jr., who played the most minutes on Thursday night that he’s played since the beginning of conference play due to an ankle injury that he suffered in late November. “We can turn it on, and we can lock in defensively. And that was the key tonight. We locked in on defense, and we got the stops that we needed.
“Defense leads to offense for us, so as long as we lock up on defense, the offense comes easy. And that’s what happened during that stretch: We locked down. We guarded their sets. We guarded their actions. And the points came.”
The points came — but the story was Winthrop’s defense. The Eagles forced USC Upstate to shoot 38.6 percent from the field, and the Spartans only shot 44 shots total, versus Winthrop’s 60 attempts.
Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey credited Kyle Zunic with igniting the Eagles’ run. Zunic scored the first five of the 13 unanswered points and drew a charge in the run as well.
“He’s like the Pete Rose of Winthrop basketball,” Kelsey said. “Nobody, probably, under 30 will understand what that means, but to me, that’s the ultimate compliment.”
After their win on Thursday night and a pair of losses from the other two previously one-loss teams (Presbyterian College and Radford), the Eagles have a two-game cushion in first place of the Big South.
Winthrop welcomes Presbyterian College to Rock Hill on Saturday at 2 p.m.
Quotable: ‘That’s the pinnacle’
Jones Jr. on if he or his teammates feel any sort of attainment: “These are ultimately regular season games. We still got to win the conference championship, then we got to go to the tournament… As long as we handle our business and are about the process, then we can focus on, when the time comes, the Big South championship. That’s the pinnacle that we want to be at.”
Guard Jamal King on being ready when his number is called: “Being able to play more and more every game, gaining that trust from my coaches is great because I want to be out there with my teammates. But on nights that I don’t play, I gotta stay even-keeled. I can’t get too down on myself because my teammates need me.”
Kelsey on the gray and neon green sneakers he and the coaching staff were wearing on Thursday night: “They’re pretty cool looking. The reason for it is, there’s this horrible, horrible, wretched disease called cancer that affects millions and millions of people. It probably affects — in some way, shape or form — everybody in this room…
“It’s just a way for the coaching fraternity to come together and give awareness that this fight and this war against cancer is real. And I give the National Association of Basketball Coaches a lot of credit for organizing this every year. And hopefully it’s a war and a battle that we can win someday.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2020 at 9:10 PM.
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