Game Highlights (Video)

Engles Postgame Comments (Video)


NEWARK, NJ—Junior guard Kellon Thomas scored 12 of his game-high 22 points over the final 3:20 to key a strong finish by visiting Kent State, as the Golden Flashes pulled out a hard-fought 80-75 victory over NJIT in non-conference men's basketball Monday night in the Fleisher Athletic Center.
 
Thomas, a redshirt junior who missed 20 games last season due to injury, was the difference-maker for Kent State (5-2) down the stretch.
 
He was already having a solid game when he started his late flurry.
 
The visitors trailed 71-67 after Tim Coleman's layup for NJIT (5-4) with 3:39 remaining. With NJIT paying special defensive attention to Kent State's star big man Jimmy Hall in the low post, Hall kicked the ball out to Thomas, who drained a 3-pointer with 3:20 left to pull the visitors to within a point of the lead.
 
Thomas converted another three on a pass out from Hall to give Kent State a 73-71 advantage with 2:12 left.
 
NJIT's Terrence Smith knotted the score on a put-back layup in traffic with 1:46 remaining, but then Thomas scored on a driving layup to put the Flashes back up 75-73 just 9 seconds after Smith had tied the score.
 
Coleman, who led NJIT's scorers with 20 points—13 in the second half—gave his team one more tie on a pair of free throws. However, Thomas sunk a 3-pointer on the next possession with 1:12 left and Xavier Pollard put the game out of NJIT's reach with a pair of free throws with less than a second remaining for the 80-75 final.
 
Thomas' 22 points were a career-high, topping the 18 he scored in a season-opening win over Youngstown State this November. He shot 6-for-9 on 3-pointers against NJIT, nearly doubling his season total (came in 7-for-25 on 3s in 6 games).
 
The Golden Flashes had three other double-figure scorers, topped by 17 points from Hall, the 6-foot-8 redshirt junior who was first-team All-Mid-American Conference last season. Hall added 6 rebounds, 5 assists (one shy of his career-best 6 set two days earlier vs. Cleveland State), and 3 blocks.
 
Freshman guard Jaylin Walker scored 15 points for Kent State, as did senior Xavier Pollard, who came off the bench to play 33 minutes and also had a game-high 9 rebounds.
 
Coleman, NJIT's junior forward, added 6 rebounds, 2 blocks, and 3 steals to his team-leading 20 points and juniors Damon Lynn and Rob Ukawuba each scored 14 for the Highlanders.
 
The Highlanders, a strong 3-point shooting team that had combined for 36 3-pointers in the preceding three games, shot an uncharacteristic 8-for-27 (29.6 pct) from distance against Kent State.
 
On a positive note, the Highlanders had a 45-34 edge in total team rebounds against a much bigger Kent State team that entered the game outrebounding its opponents by an average of more than 9 rebounds per game. However, NJIT's overall rebounding advantage did not prevent the visitors from registering 22 second chance points to 12 for the Highlanders.
 
NJIT's rebounds leader was freshman Mohamed Bendary, who pulled down 7 in 11 minutes of play. Coleman's 6 boards were tops among the Highlander starters, but it was a team effort, as guard Winfield Willis added 5 rebounds and Ky Howard, Lynn and Ukawuba all came down with 4 rebounds apiece.
 
Howard had a game-high 7 assists to lead the NJIT floor game.
 
An important part of Kent State's victory was its ability to avoid turnovers on offense and capitalize when it took the ball from NJIT.
 
Although the game was played at a quick pace (125 shots between the teams), Kent State committed just 3 turnovers in each half. The 6 total turnovers were the fewest by an NJIT opponent in 9 games this season.  
 
NJIT didn't have an especially high turnover total (13), but the visitors made the Highlanders pay, winning the points off turnovers battle 25-5 overall and 18-2 in a second half that saw the Flashes turn a 35-32 halftime deficit to an 80-75 victory.
 
The game was a matchup of two experienced, successful teams.
 
Kent State was the 2014-15 regular season champion of its division in the highly-regarded Mid-American Conference and won 23 games last season en route to a postseason run to the quarterfinals of the CollegeInsider.com national postseason Tournament (CIT).
 
The Golden Flashes, who are poised to make another run at national postseason play in 2016, came to Newark two days after beating another 2015 postseason team, Cleveland State, in Quicken Loans Arena, the home of the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers.
 
NJIT, which won 21 games a season ago and advanced one round deeper in the CIT than Kent State did, reaching the semifinals, was 5-2 two days after beating UMass Lowell on Saturday.
 
The win over UMass Lowell, which turned around and upset Boston College a day after losing to the Highlanders, was the fourth at home this season in four tries for NJIT. Going back to mid-February 2015, the Highlanders had won 10 straight home contests. Going back farther, NJIT was 19-2 in Fleisher Athletic Center since the beginning of the 2014-15 season.
 
The game lived up to its advance billing as two quality teams went at it hard for the entire 40 minutes.
 
Lynn hit a jump shot for the first two points of the game, but Kent State answered with a bucket from Hall and a 3-pointer from Walker for a 5-2 lead. NJIT responded with a free throw from Willis and a jump shot by Vlad Shustov to forge the first what would be the first of eight ties in the game.
 
Down 13-9 after Thomas nailed a jump shot for Kent State with 14:21 left in the half, the Highlanders went on an 11-0 run, taking a 20-13 lead after Lynn, one of the top 3-point shooters in college basketball, connected from downtown with 10:21 on the clock.
 
NJIT later took what would be its biggest lead of the night, 29-19, when Emmanuel Tselentakis drilled a 3-pointer with 4:20 remaining.
 
Thomas then foreshadowed his late-game heroics, sandwiching a pair of threes around two free throws by NJIT's Willis and the second three trimmed the Kent deficit to 31-25.
 
The visitors followed with six more unanswered points, capped by a Thomas triple that tied the score at 31 apiece with a minute left before Willis and Coleman each made a pair of free throws to put the Highlanders up 35-31. Khaliq Spicer, another of Kent State's bigs at 6-9, 230, made one of two free throws to arrive at the 35-32 halftime score in favor of NJIT.
 
Thomas 11 points for the Golden Flashes were game-high at the break and Willis had 9 points—7-for-8 at the foul line—to lead the home team.
 
The Highlanders came out strong to begin the second half. Walker opened the scoring with a three-pointer for Kent State, but NJIT ran off 9 straight, keyed by four points for Coleman, to take a 44-35 advantage 2:10 into the second half.
 
The Highlanders stayed in the lead until a Chris Ortiz tip-in for the Flashes tied the score at 49-49 with 12:43 to play. After another tie, Ortiz, a 6-foot-8 senior, scored a layup to give Kent State its first lead of the second  half, 56-55, at 10:43.
 
After that, neither team led by more than 4 until Pollard's free throws in the last second gave Kent State its biggest lead of the night at 80-75.
 
NJIT, which has played five teams that reached 2015 postseason play through the first nine games, plays another one on Thursday, when the Highlanders travel to St. Francis Brooklyn for a 7 pm game against the 2014-15 Northeast Conference regular season champion Terriers, who took part in the 2015 National Invitation Tournament.