A night for LU to forget

Liberty basketball coach Dale Layer was hard pressed to pinpoint what went wrong in Thursday’s ugly 67-43 home loss to Winthrop, probably because so many things tilted in the Eagles’ favor.

To summarize:

w Liberty shot 32 percent from the floor and scored no more than 22 points in either half.

w The Flames were atrocious at the free-throw line, going 8-for-21 (38.1 percent).

w They had 10 more turnovers (18) than assists.

w They allowed a team shooting 37 percent from the floor on the season to hit on nearly 50 percent of its looks.

w No Liberty player scored more than eight points.

In other words, the night was a total disaster.

“What went wrong? We got beat by a better team,” Layer said. “I thought coming in, Winthrop was playing better than anyone in our league, and they certainly demonstrated that. I thought they were the tougher team. We struggled with their defensive pressure, and I thought they beat us in just about every phase of the game.”

Layer has often pointed out that Liberty’s relative youth — the Flames start three freshmen and two more play significant minutes off the bench — cannot be used as an excuse at this point of the season, noting that with the minutes they’ve played, the freshmen are more like sophomores.

That wasn’t the case Thursday. Freshman Evan Gordon scored eight points but missed seven shots and turned the ball over four times. Patrick Konan, another rookie, scored seven points, but the 6-foot-5 forward struggled to drive and rebound against Winthrop’s Matt Morgan and Andy Buechert, both of whom are 6-9. Konan also had four turnovers.

Freshman Antwan Burrus was 1-for-6, scoring four points and missed three of his five foul shots. Another frosh, Chris Perez, didn’t fare much better, going 2-for-6 from the floor and 2-for-5 from the line. Both had two turnovers.

“I think our youth was exposed a little bit tonight,” Layer said. “Hopefully we can regroup.”

The Flames will have to do so quickly as they welcome the one team in the Big South with more youth than they have into the Vines Center for a 7 p.m. tip. Presbyterian, which is 4-20 and hasn’t won a road game this season, plays just eight players regularly and nearly all the key contributors are freshmen, save for sophomore leading scorer Chase Holmes.

Liberty has reason to believe that the 43-point showing against Winthrop was a blip, not a trend. Winthrop plays the most physical defense in the Big South, and the Eagles were even tougher to score upon than usual Thursday.

WU coach Randy Peele made a nice adjustment from the first meeting, a 65-62 Winthrop win in Rock Hill, rotating players into the middle to cut off Liberty’s drives and coming hard off ball screens to deny easy ball reversals.

“I felt like our offense was very jammed up,” Flames point guard Jesse Sanders said. “We were getting very little production out of our half-court offense. … I think most of it was that we weren’t creating plays. We were trying to attack one-on-one too much.”

Many possessions went like this: The Flames reversed the ball around the perimeter, looked for a post entry, and when the forward down low was covered, he’d kick it back out to the top of the key with 10 seconds or less on the shot clock. That left one option, an isolation play for either Sanders or Gordon. At that point, Liberty was very easy to defend.

The Flames went more than 10 minutes without a field goal in the second half and scored more than half of their first-half points in one 4 ½-minute spurt.

As the bad possessions piled up, frustrations mounted.

Said Gordon: “We just kind of lost our composure when they started pressuring us and taking away different swing plays. … They’re a good defensive team. They disrupt a lot of offenses throughout the league.”