Southern Miss basketball snags first place in Sun Belt with 82-71 win over Louisiana
Consider the energy renewed at Reed Green Coliseum.
Southern Miss took sole possession of first place in the Sun Belt on Thursday with an 82-71 win over Louisiana in front of the first sell-out crowd at RGC in over 10 years.
Buoyed by 8,097 raucous fans, the Golden Eagles (22-4, 11-2) overcame a halftime deficit and an onslaught from the league’s highest-scoring forward to put an end Louisiana’s 10-game win streak.
Neftali Alvarez came off the bench and poured in a season-high 17 points for USM while Deandre Pinckney led the team with 22. Felipe Haase added 17 points and Austin Crowley contributed 13.
“Reed Green is a special place and it was special again tonight,” USM coach Jay Ladner said after the game. “It was a good win for our program.”
Louisiana built a 10-point lead in the first half off efficient post play from Brown, who scored 16 of his 25 points in the opening 20 minutes.
Brown scored just nine points on 2-of-6 shooting after Tyler Morman was tasked with slowing him down in the second half.
“I know his name is probably not going to show up huge in terms of stats, but I thought Tyler Morman did an incredible job in there off the bench,” Ladner said. “Big, physical, I thought he got after Jordan Brown. Jordan is a great player, Player of the Year in our league, (Morman) made things tough on him. I thought he wore him down a bit.”
Morman was the catalyst for the Eagles’ defensive shift in the second half. Louisiana shot 46.7 percent in the first half and just 28.6 percent in the second. The Cajuns, who are the SBC leaders in 3-point shooting percentage, missed all 10 3s it fired in the last 20 minutes.
The win placed the Golden Eagles atop the league standings, far higher than the 13th-place finish SBC coaches predicted in October.
Alvarez’s arrival
In his sixth game back from injury, Alvarez electrified the building with the most points the Puerto Rican guard has scored in a game since getting 22 against Bucknell while playing for Mercer in Nov. 2021.
More than just providing flashy handles and bulldog drives to the rim, Alvarez was the spark plug USM needed to keep the Eagles within striking distance.
While Crowley and Haase combined for just five first-half points, a 9-2 run later in the half — featuring seven from Alvarez — swung the momentum just before the break.
“(Alvarez) is a dynamic player, impact player,” Ladner said. “When he gets in there, things happen. He can bring tremendous pressure defensively and I think the bigger the game, the bigger he plays.”
Alvarez bridged the scoring gap to the second half, where Crowley and Haase combined to score 25 points.
Southern Miss poured in 49 points in the second half for the second straight game and has reached the 40-point mark after the break in each of the past three games.
“I came from the bench and I accept my role,” Alvarez said. “I know what the team wants from me and I have to do the little stuff like playing defense, making the extra pass, driving and get people open. That’s what I did. I was ready to go onto the court and do my thing.”
Sold Out RGC
For the first time since hosting Memphis in 2008, the Golden Eagles announced a sellout crowd for a men’s basketball game. Playing underneath a deep white-out and a live DJ, USM fed off the energy.
“Our basketball fan base has been so hungry,” Ladner said. “We’ve, of course, struggled over the last couple of years and to go from where we were at the start of the season with probably just a few hundred people in the stands to selling out, our players are feeding off of that. They’re impacting winning.”
Ladner said a preseason basketball event drew just 26 people, and Haase told him then if they held the same event at the end of the year, “There will be a heck of a lot more.”
Haase knew. Over the course of the conference season, the crowds have risen from a then-season high 3,265 fans against Troy to a then-Ladner era record of 4,128 against South Alabama.
Ten minutes before tipoff against Louisiana, the crowd on hand likely bested both already.
“It’s my third year and I’ve seen it with nobody in there,” Pinckney said of RGC. “Actually, when we were in warmups, I was starting to get a little emotional. I done really seen it go from nobody in here to sold out crowd... Nobody expected us to do what we’re doing, but we got guys who believe and guys who trust the process.”
Southern Miss will have a chance to follow up with another strong crowd on Saturday when it hosts the only team voted to finish lower than USM in the league, Louisiana-Monroe.
The Warhawks are also overachieving, posting a 7-6 conference record this season. The game is set to tip at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN+.
This story was originally published February 9, 2023 at 11:48 PM.
