LAKE CHARLES, La. – The ACU Wildcats couldn't recover from a poor shooting performance in the opening half and they had no answer for McNeese State's top two players as the Cowboys knocked off the Wildcats, 63-56, in a Southland Conference contest at Burton Coliseum.
Desharick Guidry – the Southland's fifth-leading scorer – finished with a game-high 21 points and Kevin Hardy added 18 for the Cowboys, who snapped a four-game losing streak in conference play to improve to 7-9 overall and 1-4 in the league.
The loss for the Wildcats, meanwhile, is their second straight after starting Southland play at 3-0. ACU is now 9-9 on the season and 3-2 in the league. The Wildcats will return home Saturday when it hosts Incarnate Word in a Southland Conference game at 4 p.m. The women's game will begin at 2 p.m. and the doubleheader will feature the Mavs Maniacs.
The Wildcats hit just 5 of 23 shots from the field in the opening 20 minutes and finished the game just 17 of 53 from the field (32.1 percent), including 7 of 20 from 3-point range (35 percent). ACU entered the game as the league's top free throw shooting team (76.4 percent), but the Wildcats hit just 15 of 24 shots from the charity stripe (62.5 percent), and all of those numbers contributed to the loss for the Wildcats.
"I didn't think we were bad defensively, but offensively we just weren't very good," ACU head coach
Joe Golding said. "We tried a lot of different things and combinations, but we just couldn't get anything going. We had good looks early in the game that didn't go down and then we started settling for looks that weren't good shots. Offensively we just couldn't figure it out, but we'll do a better job this week in practice and we'll get some things fixed."
McNeese – which wasn't much better offensively – hit just 22 of 56 shots from the field (39.3 percent), including a meager 2 of 20 from 3-point range (10 percent). The Cowboys also managed to keep the Wildcats in the game by shooting just 47.2 percent from the free throw line (17 of 36).
The Wildcats trailed 27-19 at halftime and saw McNeese push its lead to 49-35 with 11:02 to play in the game, putting them in danger of being blown out. But ACU managed to rally, cutting the McNeese lead to 53-49 with 3:17 to play on a pair of free throws from
Harrison Hawkins.
After a Hawkins layup attempt was blocked by Austin Lewis with 2:37 to play, the Cowboys got a dunk from Lewis with 1:34 to play to make it 55-49 and a layup from Hardy with 1:14 to play to make it 57-49. ACU would cut it to five points a couple of times inside the last 60 seconds, but couldn't pull any closer.
Hawkins led the Wildcats with 12 points, while
LaDarrien Williams had 11 for the Wildcats.
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