Defense lifts Bulldogs over Liberty

For much of Saturday night, 6-foot-5 forward Quinard Jackson was the tallest UNC Asheville player on the floor. So it’s understandable that any player wearing a Liberty uniform would look at the stat sheet after Asheville’s 65-51 victory at the Vines Center and shake his head at two glaring stats: The Bulldogs grabbed 16 offensive rebounds and out-rebounded the Flames 47-31.

“I think we played good enough for most of the game,” Liberty point guard Jesse Sanders said. “We just didn’t rebound the ball tough enough to win the game. They beat us by 16 on the glass, and I think that’s the story. If we rebound equal in this game, we’re celebrating tonight.”

Instead, the Bulldogs celebrated their eighth conference road win of the year and remained two games clear of second place Coastal Carolina in the Big South standings. And they did it in an unorthodox way — with defense.

Asheville (18-7, 13-1 Big South) held Liberty to 35.2 percent shooting from the floor, its best defensive performance of the year against a Division I opponent. (It held NAIA Montreat to 34.9 percent.) Liberty’s issues were in the paint. The Flames went 6-for-12 from 3-point range but were just 12-for-42 (28.6 percent) from inside the arc.

“That’s just a bad night,” Sanders said. “I mean, they play good D, but we’ve seen a lot better defensive teams. I would not say that’s their strength.”

And that’s precisely why Asheville’s players and coaches were excited after the win. Liberty (9-16, 4-9) took the Bulldogs out of their comfort zone, slowed the pace and turned the game into a physical, defensive battle. For a while, the ploy worked. The Flames shook off a brutal offensive start to tie the game at 22 just before halftime, and they built a 33-30 lead after Tomasz Gielo’s trailer 3-pointer at the top of the key with 15:55 remaining.

Asheville counter-punched and went on a 13-0 run to seize control. Probably the Bulldogs’ least feared offensive weapon, Jackson scored seven of his nine points during the run.

“That was the game right there,” Liberty coach Dale Layer said. “In a lower-possession, slower-paced game, you can’t do that. They face-cut us a couple of times at the rim, one on a back spin, one a UCLA cut, and that kind of got their confidence going. You can’t reveal a crack to them, because they expose it.”

The Bulldogs did enough defensively the rest of the way to seal the win. Though smallish, Asheville is extremely active in the paint, with players using their arms to close off passing lanes and turn deflections into transition baskets the other way. The Bulldogs didn’t allow much in the way of easy inside baskets, and they outscored Liberty 38-16 in the paint and held a 16-7 scoring advantage on second-chance opportunities.

“When we get charges and deflections, we just feed off of that on offense and run,” said Asheville forward Jeremy Atkinson, who had 10 points and 10 rebounds and was one of three Bulldogs to finish in double figures in rebounds. “Offensive rebounds, second-chance shots, that gets us going to. That’s a good sign for us. We played defense. We held Liberty to 51 points. That’s way below what we’re allowing. That was probably our best game [this year] on defense right here.”

The Flames’ night on the glass was summed up by one second-half play, when the Bulldogs fought for two offensive rebounds before Chris Stephenson flushed home a wide-open dunk to finish the possession. That put Asheville up 45-35, and the Flames got no closer than seven points after that.

John Caleb Sanders led the Flames with 15 points and went 4-for-7 from 3-point range. Antwan Burrus scored eight points to go along with 10 rebounds and four blocks. The loss dropped Liberty into a tie for ninth in the Big South with Presbyterian College, a half-game back of High Point.