Neither foul trouble nor the opposing defense could contain Dwayne Evans. The junior forward scored a game-high 25 points to power top-seeded Saint Louis to a 72-55 victory over Charlotte in the quarterfinals of the Atlantic 10 tournament Friday afternoon at the Barclays Center. The Billikens (25-6) will take on Butler in the semifinals Saturday afternoon.
“He scores almost every time down or he gets fouled,” Mike McCall Jr. said.
Evans, a first-team All-Conference selection, drained his first seven shots of the game before shot number eight—an attempted put back off a missed 3-pointer from Cody Ellis—bounced off the rim and out with 7:35 left. He finished eight-for-nine from the field and nine-for-nine from the free throw line to go with nine rebounds.
“He’s their best post player, and you wouldn’t say that for a 6-6 guy on most teams,” 49ers coach Alan Major said. “He’s the guy that, when they need a basket to throw the ball inside to, he’s the best guy they have. He’s kind of an unsung hero on that team.”
Despite hitting just three of 13 shots from the field, Ellis finished with 13 points to go with three steals and a pair of rebounds. The senior forward continued to struggle from behind the arc, hitting just one of seven 3-point attempts. He would have been two-for-eight, but his 40-footer that banked in off the backboard came a split second after the shot clock had expired.
Spurred on by the momentum from a 12-7 first half-ending run, the 49ers began chipping away at the deficit early in the second half, capitalizing on the absence of Evans, who was on the bench with three fouls, and a one for eight shooting performance from SLU to cut the deficit back to single digits.
With Charlotte poised to make a run at the top-seeded Billikens, Evans returned and promptly hit a layup to push the score to 43-33 with over 14 minutes left. His bucket sparked an 11-3 run that gave the Billikens a comfortable 16-point advantage.
The correlation between Evans’ return and Saint Louis’ offensive resurgence in the second half was due in large part to a concerted effort by the team to work the ball inside to the 6-foot-5 forward.
“We’ve got some of the best passers in America out there,” Evans explained. “A lot of those passes I hardly saw coming.”
While it was a rather lackluster statistical performance from the Billikens, who shot just 37 percent from the field (21-56) and hit just five of 23 attempts from behind the arc, their unselfish style of play and crisp ball movement generated plenty of open looks. As a team, they had 15 assists, 12 of which came from the trio of Rob Loe, Kwamain Mitchell and McCall (four apiece).
Defensively, SLU forced 20 turnovers and limited Charlotte to just 19 of 49 shooting. Mitchell played a pivotal role in the team’s defensive success, accounting for four of the team’s 11 steals.
“I think we got the win kind of like we usually do,” interim coach Jim Crews said. “We get a little from the defense, a little inside. We don’t shoot the ball that well from 3. It seemed like we get threes at the right time, get to the line. We have a lot of different ways. I don’t know if we’re really, really good at any of them, but we’re good at a lot of them.”
Charlotte managed to pull within three behind consecutive 3-pointers from Ivan Benkovic and Chris Braswell midway through the first half, but Saint Louis responded with a 13-0 run to push the score to 32-16 with 8:43 remaining. That scoring spurt was highlighted by a seven-point outburst from McCall, who also had a steal, an offensive rebound and two assists to help the Billikens’ cause.
“Our defense generated a lot of good things for us from an offensive standpoint in the first 10-12 minutes and then we got a little stagnant,” Crews explained. “They went zone, gave us problems for a little bit…[but] I thought our guys did a good job of going from their zone defense and switching back to man-to-man defense.”
“We got out to a really quick start,” Evans said. “We weren’t gambling; we were falling into steals [and] just making really solid defensive plays—that’s what really contributed to the run.”
Saint Louis and Butler will square off for the third time this season Saturday afternoon at 12:30 p.m. CDT. The winner will advance to the Sunday’s championship game.
