PHILADELPHIA – Bruiser Flint is known as a defensive coach, and his Drexel teams always have a clear identity as a tough defensive team. Offensively, the Dragons have put up some numbers that aren’t pretty during his tenure, but they haven’t lacked talent. And although this season’s team has had a tough time offensively, they have shown at times that they’re very capable of scoring. There’s a simple thing that makes all the difference, and it showed up in the second half against Cornell on Sunday.
“In the second half, we just made them guard us,” Flint said after the Dragons’ loss to the Big Red. “When we came out, we ran offense. Honestly, that’s what we knew we could do from the beginning, but we just didn’t carry it out at the beginning of the game.”
Last year’s Dragons were tenth in the Colonial in scoring and last in field goal percentage by a wide margin, shooting 37.2 percent from the field. Entering Sunday’s game, they were shooting 36.3 percent from the field and just 22.7 percent from long range.
Flint said before the season that last year’s team simply had trouble making shots, including open ones. He felt they ran good offense, and considering they didn’t turn the ball over a large number of times, it’s clear he’s not trying to offer up a euphemism. And a look at the field goal percentages shows that even the post players, who typically got shots closer to the basket than the guards, struggled to make shots, as only Leon Spencer shot better than 50 percent from the field.
In light of that, anyone who had not seen the Dragons prior to the second half against Cornell might have come away with a vastly different impression of their offense. After turning the ball over 12 times in the first half, which matched their total for the entire game against Vermont on Friday, the Dragons had just six turnovers and shot 68 percent from the field in the second half. The guards looked like they could score all day.
“We decided to be patient and let our offense work itself through,” said forward Samme Givens. “In the first half, we rushed a lot of shots. Once we settled down, we started getting into the flow of our game and making them play our game.”
Indeed, the Dragons took a lot of shots early in the possession in the first half. When they weren’t doing that, their starting guard trio of Gerald Colds, Jamie Harris and Derrick Thomas were turning the ball over – seven times against one assist. In the second half, they combined for 29 points on 11-16 shooting.
It’s for that reason that Flint told his team they didn’t have to look far to see what can happen with an experienced team.
“I give them credit, this was a great game, because you see, when your team is experienced, what happens,” Flint said of Cornell. “There was no panic in those guys, they made big plays when they needed to, they stayed within themselves. Whereas, I start the game and all my guys are running, going crazy, trying to go to the basket, trying to do things they can’t do.”
As usual, the Dragons’ defense will keep them in games. A very good Cornell offense shot just 40.4 percent from the field against them on Sunday, and opponents are turning the ball over nearly 15 times per game. None of the Dragons’ four losses thus far have been blowouts – Flint at one point commented, “we haven’t had a clunker all season” – so they’re not far away from winning more games. If they show a little more patience on offense and the results follow, their defense will probably be enough to win a lot of games the rest of the way.
