Fordham Recap

The Aggies were glad to be back home and bounced back from their 0-2 road trip last night by defeating Fordham at Reed Arena by a score of 84-61. The win was the 30th straight non-conference home win for the good guys.

Josh Carter (24 points) and Antanas Kavaliauskas (19 points) led the way for A&M as both guys did an outstanding job of knocking down shots. They combined to go 17 of 21 from the field. Josh was 4 of 5 from deep and AK even hit a three from the top of the key.

Josh looked much more assertive last night. He had three great drives to the basket along the baseline that resulted in two dunks and an acrobatic layup. I guess Josh and the coaching staff noticed something on film last week as Josh said, "I was just focusing on being more aggressive. I watched film on the last two games. I wasn't taking shots when I had them. I was being pretty passive."

As we said last week - This team is absolutely going to need Josh to score points in order for them to have any long term success.

Gillispie, ever the teacher, had this to say about Carter's performance last night:

"He's such a good shooter and passer and he's learning how to play and take advantage of a defense no matter how he's being guarded. He can't be a liability defensively. You have to execute defensively to be a good team. Josh is a very intelligent player. We have a lot of intelligent players, but he's not paying enough attention to detail in crunch time. He's a sophomore and he's played a lot of minutes. He's a good player and he has flashes where he plays really good defense like he did for the most part tonight. But he can't continue to give up three points to start every game."

Random Thoughts

The Aggies only had 11 turnovers last night. It was great to see them do a better job taking care of the ball.

16 players saw the court last night with Roland, Sloan, Pompey, and Elonu leading the minutes off of the bench.

Joe Jones (13 points 6 Rebounds) was double teamed in the lane nearly the entire night - this is part of the reason AK had a huge game.

Dominique Kirk apparently got the night off as he only played 19 minutes. Sloan and Roland got the balance of Dominique's usual time.

Acie did a great job of getting other people involved last night as he had a team high 7 assists to go along with 11 points.

I'll spare all of you my thoughts on Pompey's 15 minutes - just know it was more of the same.

Looking Ahead

Jacksonville comes to Reed on Saturday evening. The contest should be fairly lopsided.

After Jacksonville, things tighten up again as the Aggies visit Auburn (Dec. 22) and then host Winthrop (Jan. 2). In-between those two games they also host Grambling (Dec. 28) which should also not be close.

4 more games left to close out non-conference play.

I will be out of pocket on Saturday, but I will try to watch the game when I get back and send you guys another note. If you have not gone to AggieAthletics.com and watched a game, it's a pretty cool service (especially for free). The live stream is actually of pretty good quality. They also archive all of the games after they are complete and you can watch those for free as well.

Carry on.
-sb