South Carolina pulls away in second half to earn Black Friday win over Charleston Southern

Maybe it was the Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps it was the five-day layoff from game action. Lamont Paris even thought that Thursday’s practice wasn’t good “by any stretch of the imagination.”

Whatever it was, South Carolina sleepwalked through a good portion of Friday’s game against Quad 4 foe Charleston Southern. However, the Gamecocks eventually got it going in the second half to pick up a 74-62 win over the Bucanneers at Colonial Life Arena.

“It’s hard to practice on Thanksgiving and say you’re going to be focused and locked in,” Paris said. “The guys may think, they’re looking down at the schedule, and they see Charleston Southern. Maybe they’re not familiar with them. That all probably played into it. It’s hard, but you have to be mature and go about your business and think about the big picture versus the next hour. That’s an area that we still have to get better.”

After leading by as much as 11 in the first half, that advantage quickly evaporated as Charleston Southern went on a 12-0 run to take its first lead with 6:19 left before the break. There were four first-half lead changes, ending with the Gamecocks (5-2) up by two at halftime after holding the Bucanneers scoreless in the last two and a half minutes.

South Carolina’s shooting woes from the winless weekend at The Greenbrier carried into Friday as the team shot 36.4 percent from the field in the first half. It also went 3-of-13 from three-point range (23.1 percent) in that time, missing a handful of open looks.

“We happened to come in a little flat, and it happens. It happens to a really good team,” Elijah Strong said. “We’ve just got to be more mature in that type of situation. We just came out flat today, and we don’t plan on making that a habit.”

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Those struggles continued with both teams still locked into a stalemate near the midway point of the second half. However, when Kobe Knox dunked all over Charleston Southern’s 6-foot-11 big man Lase Olalere, the crowd inside Colonial Life Arena came to life, and the Gamecocks did as well.

Over the next five minutes, South Carolina went on a 14-4 run to build its first double-digit point lead since the 8:50 mark of the first half. Knox, who started to shift the momentum in the game with his dunk, had 15 points on 6-of-8 shooting.

“It was a great play. I’m just trying to find ways to bring energy to the team. And that happened to be mine today,” Knox said. “But coaches and players tell me to keep cutting, keep cutting. That diagonal cut was one of the ones coming into the game that we knew was gonna be open. So I saw it was open and I took it.”

Even after Charleston Southern went on another mini-run to cut the deficit down to single digits, the game never truly got that close again. Still, it didn’t change the fact that the Gamecocks’ struggles were apparent and remained unresolved. Overall, they shot 41.7 percent from the field and 20.8 percent from beyond the arc. That marks four straight games of shooting less than 30 percent from three.

“We’re going to shoot threes. Got to make them,” Paris said. “We don’t force them. Just the way we’re built, we’re going to shoot threes. We need to make a good percentage. … You have shooters that you believe in, and then you continue to do that at some point in any particular game. Sure, you have to look for other sources of offense, but that’s going to be a good source for us throughout the season.”

Strong, who didn’t check in until five minutes left in the first half, finished with a team-leading 22 points on 9-of-16 shooting. 20 of Strong’s season-high in points came in the second half.

Paris said the reason why Strong didn’t come in for his first minutes until late into the first half was due to his knees bothering him “just a little bit.” He referenced a play from the Northwestern loss on Sunday in the Greenbrier Tip-Off, where Strong slipped on the floor, and that may have aggravated it. But it clearly didn’t impact his play on the court too much on Friday.

“He can generate offense. Let’s not kid ourselves,” Paris said. “He can generate offense in a lot of ways as a scorer, but he’s extremely intelligent. He has an extremely high basketball IQ, especially on the offensive end. Regardless of what you’re doing, he seems to find a place to get to that makes sense and allows you to run some offense, so I thought we needed that.”

Up next: South Carolina will face Virginia Tech in the ACC/SEC Challenge at Colonial Life Arena next Tuesday, Dec. 2. Tip-off will be at 7 p.m. on SEC Network.

“We’re obviously happy that we won. But we’re not super satisfied with what happened today,” Strong said. “So we’re going to come back, and we’re gonna come stronger. We’ve got a better opponent coming in here on Tuesday. We’re going to try to go punch them in the mouth.”

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