Box score

FARMVILLE, VA—Star senior post player Antwan Carter registered 28 points and 12 rebounds Saturday afternoon, leading Longwood to an 85-70 non-conference men's basketball win over visiting NJIT.
 
Carter, who notched the 32nd double-double of a career that has seen him pile up 1,571 points and 864 rebounds, was one of four double-figure scorers for the Lancers, who never trailed Saturday in raising their record to 5-11, while snapping a five-game losing streak.
 
NJIT, which beat Lafayette by 20 points (78-58) at home on Monday night for one of the most impressive wins of its Division I era (since 2006-07), was able to score at a decent clip at Longwood, but never showed what some coaches call "defensive control", a vital attribute against the Lancers, who have scored as many as 110 points in a game this year (defeated VMI, 110-89, in their last win before the five-game slide that ended against NJIT).
 
The Highlanders, now 6-8, have yet to get back-to-back wins this season and, in addition to not defending well on Saturday, NJIT's shooting vs. Longwood was precipitously off what it had been just five days earlier on Monday against Lafayette.
 
In beating Lafayette, NJIT made 13-of-22 3-point tries, setting a new program Division I record for 3-point percentage in a game (59.1 percent). At Longwood, the Highlanders had a similar number of tries (21), but made just four and three of those came in a second half where they were more than offset by Longwood's 6-for-12 shooting from distance.
 
Four NJIT starters reached double-figure scoring on Saturday, led by Chris Flores, who finished with 19 points. Flores, who had one of his strongest games of the year in terms of getting to the rim, struggled on the outside, going 1-for-8, after missing just once in six 3-point tries in the big win vs. Lafayette. Against Longwood, Flores was 6-for-9 inside the arc, mostly on drives, and added four points at the foul line, where he was 4-for-5.
 
Isaiah Wilkerson finished with 14 points and led the Highlanders on the boards, with seven rebounds. However, three Lancers topped his individual rebounding total, as Longwood won that area, 39-31.
 
For NJIT, PJ Miller and Ryan Woods added 11 and 10 points, respectively, but the bench combined for just 13 points at Longwood, that after it had played a big role in both the Lafayette win and also in the game before that, coming back from a 21-point second-half deficit to get close at LIU.
 
In addition to Carter's game-high scoring and rebound totals, Longwood got 18 points and eight rebounds from senior guard Martiz Washington; 16 points and seven assists from senior guard Jeremiah Bowman; and 12 points, all on 4-for-4 second-half 3-point shooting off the bench from sophomore guard David Robinson. Jan van der Kooij, a senior forward, scored just two points, but collected eight rebounds.
 
Longwood had just lost on Tuesday night, 96-77, at Army, a place where NJIT had won, 54-53, on November 30. But comparative scores were useless in assessing the NJIT-Longwood matchup.
 
Instead, Saturday's Longwood score more closely resembled NJIT's opponents' scores in the Highlanders' previous six losses. The Highlanders lost their season opener at Manhattan, 62-48, but in their seven losses since, they have yielded at least 77 points each time, with Longwood's 85 points representing an opponents' season-high.
 
In NJIT's six wins, its opponents have averaged 50.5 points overall, and its Division I victims have averaged only a little better—54.7 points, with a high 58.
 
Some degree of the more than 20-point gap in opponents' scores between wins and losses can be attributed to the high level of teams NJIT faced—three Big East teams, including Georgetown, a national Top 10 team; plus LIU, a defending conference champion that won 27 games last season and is scoring-oriented; and UMass, a strong team from the respected Atlantic 10.
 
However, it's clear that when NJIT is able to exert defensive control, it can win its share of games. Against Longwood, that rarely happened, so the result was that NJIT, which fell behind early, had trouble making meaningful inroads. Most of the time, when the Highlanders got into a flow on offense, Longwood answered on the other end.
 
The Lancers scored first, NJIT tied, and then Longwood went up 6-2 and soon 11-3 on a Martiz Washington 3-pointer 3:42 into the game.
 
Carter's second basket of the day made it 16-7 for Longwood at the 14:21 mark, but NJIT got back in with a 7-2 run capped by back-to-back driving layups for PJ Miller, the second one closing the gap to 18-16 with 12:08 left.
 
Longwood still led by two, 28-26, just under five minutes later, when the Lancers got the spurt that gave them the upper hand for the rest of the half, and ultimately, for the game.
 
Having been unable to pull away after the quick start, Longwood finally stretched its lead from two to 10, 36-26, with an 8-0 run in a span of 1:33, topped by back-to-back steals and breakaway layups for Tristan Carey.
 
Interestingly, NJIT had a 9-8 lead in the half on points-of-turnovers, but those two quick steals and baskets for Carey at 6:03 and 5:30, respectively, gave his team the upper hand for the rest of the half, which ended at 44-33 for Longwood.
 
The Lancers, who dressed only nine players, had three with double-figure points at the break, with 12 apiece for Carter and Bowman and 10 for Washington, plus eight from Carey, accounting for 42 of the team's 44 first-half points. Miller's seven points paced NJIT.
 
Even though he was sharing game scoring honors at halftime, Longwood's Carter did not have an easy time in the opening 20 minutes, connecting on barely a third of his shots (4-for-11). However, his 12-point total was helped by 4-for-4 shooting at the foul line. Bowman, the co-scoring leader, took the rest of the team's free throws and was 6-for-7, for a team total of 10-for-11.
 
In the second half Saturday, Carter, who had 29 points and 11 rebounds the last time he played NJIT (a 65-64 loss at NJIT last February 5), dominated, shooting 8-for-11, mostly from within five feet of the basket, over the final 20 minutes.
 
With Carter's 8-for-11 at the fore, the Lancers shot 61.5 percent (16-26) in the second half. They also shot a solid 51.6 percent from the field in the first half and finished at 56.1 percent (32-57), the best for an NJIT foe this year.
 
Carter took 11 of his team's 14 second-half shots from inside the arc and the outside game clicked in the second half, as well. Longwood shot 6-for-12 on threes in the second half, including the 4-for-4 from Robinson, who had gone scoreless in 11 minutes playing time in the opening half.
 
After falling behind by 13, 50-37, on a pull-up jumper in the lane by Longwood's Bowman with 17:24 remaining, NJIT went on a 7-0 run, ending with Wilkerson's traditional 3-point play that reduced the Lancer lead to 50-44 at 14:48.
 
Longwood answered with an 11-6 run, that highlighted NJIT's inability to get the stops it would need for a successful rally. The Highlanders, who made only four treys all day, got two of them in back-to-back possessions, but they were lost in an 11-point Longwood flurry that featured three triples in a row by Robinson in a span of 1:42 that pushed the Lancer lead back to 11, 61-50, with 12:09 remaining.
 
The gap fluctuated by a couple of points either way for the next three minutes, before Robinson hit his fourth three of the half at the 7:48 mark, putting his team ahead by 12 and triggered an 11-2 run.
 
After Robinson's last trey, NJIT's Wilkerson made a jump shot, but there were no stops on the next three Longwood possessions for the Highlanders, as Washington hit his fourth 3-pointer of the game 18 seconds after the Wilkerson bucket; then Bowman drove for a score on the next possession; and, Washington hit a three 30 seconds after that, and the deficit went from a difficult, but not hopeless, 10 for the Highlanders with 6:52 left to a near-impossible 76-58 Longwood lead 97 seconds later.
 
The Lancers led by at least 15 and as many as 19 for the rest of the game.
 
NJIT will continue its trip with another non-conference game on Tuesday, when it visits first-time opponent CSU Bakersfield in California. Like Longwood, CSU Bakersfield is a Division I Independent. That game is set to tip off at 7 pm Pacific.