La Salle Explorers Roll to their Fourth Straight Win

By Chuck Booth | Jan 15, 2017

Two teams on different paths met today at the Tom Gola Arena. The La Salle Explorers looking to win their fourth straight and the George Washington Colonials looked to right the ship.

From wire to wire the La Salle Explorers [10-5, 4-1 A10] controlled the game in their best performance of the season. La Salle beat the George Washington Colonials [9-9, 1-4 A10] by a scoreline of 79-69 to move into a tie for second in the conference. Led by Jordan Price with 23 points, the Explorers rarely worried in this one.

In his opening statement, coach G said, “I’m so proud of Jordan because he’s becoming a great player. And that’s not easy, that’s why there’s so few of them, A great player’s efficient, a great player gets rebounds, a great player is good at passing, a great player plays defense, and he does all of that.”

He’s right because Price is the clear leader of this team and it shows.

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The La Salle Explorers started this game off with a bang thanks to back-to-back threes from Jordan Price and BJ Johnson. Those threes keyed a 12-4 run for the Explorers to take control of the game early. They were able to accomplish this with an early mixture of threes and getting the ball to their big men in the paint. The normally stout Colonials were consistently caught in an in-between area on defense, not where you want to be against one of the best shooting teams in the country.

Both teams took advantage of some hot shooting early but the early run for the La Salle explorers gave them much needed breathing room when the Colonials got into their groove. Once both teams got going, each was shooting over 50 percent from the field but back to back daggers from Cleon Roberts (who’s shooting 52.2 percent from three) got the Explorers back out to a 26-19 lead.

That sequence was the story of the first half as the Colonials would attempt to go on a run jut to be stopped by the Explorers. Both teams shot well, but La Salle shot the ball better and to win a game that’s all you really have to do. The La Salle Explorers relied on scoring in the paint to close the half as they outscored the Colonials 16-0 inside.

Jordan Price was easily the player of the half as he scored 15 of the Explorers 40 points helping the Explorers to a 10 point halftime advantage. Jordan Price was 6-7 from the field to lead the hot-shooting Explorers who shot 68.2 (!) percent from the field in the first half. Halves like this are exactly why the La Salle Explorers rank 37th nationally in effective field goal percentage.

When the second half got underway, it seemed like there were some shifts to the Colonials offensive gameplan. George Washington started the half on a 6-0 run in order to cut the Explorers advantage to four. The interesting thing was after scoring no points in the paint in the first half, all of those points for the Colonials were in the paint.

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But as the Explorers did the entire game, they countered George Washington’s runs with ones of their own. Once La Salle went on an 8-0 run to get up 13 with ten minutes to go, there was no looking back. The Explores led for 98.8 percent of the game and never trailed for a single minute.

At that point, you know the drill:

While the Explorers still need to put it together on the offensive end, they left much to be desired defensively. They’ll have to clear that up in time for Thursday’s game against the Davidson Wildcats who are coming off a huge win over VCU. But these Explorers are ready for the challenge.

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