Brown Bears Beat Black Bears 62-54
Sunday, December 05, 2010
The Brown Bears wrapped up their 3-game swing through the America East conference Saturday with a 62-54 win at Maine. After tough losses at New Hampshire and Hartford, Brown played with a lot of toughness in Orono picking up the hard-fought and well earned victory.
Unlike the Bears previous two games where they fell behind early, Brown jumped out to a 6-0 lead Saturday on three pointers by freshman Sean McGonagill (7 pts) and sophomore Tucker Halpern (12 pts, 10 reb).
The Bears led most of the way in the first half but a Mike Allison bucket with 2 seconds left in the half gave Maine a 28-27 lead at the break.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe Black Bears extended their lead to 7 on two occasions early in the second half, but the Brown Bears were equal to the task. The combination of strong defensive play, solid offensive execution and perfection from the free throw line (17-17) helped the Bears battle back in the second half to win the game.
Brown senior co-captain Peter Sullivan led all scorers with 21 points. Sullivan went 13-13 from the free throw line on the afternoon. He also passed two Brown basketball greats in Russ Tyler (’71) and Matt Mullery (’10) to jump into 16th place on the school’s all-time career scoring list with 1,044 points.
Bears big man Andrew McCarthy also came up big for Brown blocking numerous Maine shot attempts. McCarthy finished the game with 4 points, 6 rebounds and only 1 block on the official stat sheet. However, McCarthy had a minimum of 4-5 blocked shots all of which were big for the Bears.
Brown coach Jesse Agel also got solid contributions from his bench with seniors Garrett Leffelman (9 pts) and Chris Taylor (6 pts, 4 reb). Taylor’s 6 points matches his career high.
Freshman Dockery Walker also gave Brown fans a glimpse of his tremendous athleticism in his 7 minutes of action.
“I was really impressed with what our guys did today against a team picked to win the America East along with BU,” said Agel. “They fought hard today and played well again defensively as we did in Hartford.”
Brown dominated the backboards out-rebounding Maine 40-30 for the game.
With the victory, Brown improves to (4-3) while Maine drops to (2-4) with the loss.
Next up for the Bears is a match-up with intra-city rival Providence College (8-1) at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center Monday night at 7pm.
