Sharp-Shooting Lafayette Downs CU

Only four days after its best performance of the season, Columbia men's basketball fell back to the struggles that have marked its season so far, losing at home to Lafayette, 78-64. The Lions once again shot below 40 percent from the field, finishing 20-56, while committing 17 turnovers. Overmatched by the Leopards' motion offense, the Lions' defense gave up 57 percent shooting from the field.

"For a team to come in here and shoot like that, those are numbers I'm going to be looking at," head coach Joe Jones said.

Columbia jumped out to a 5-0 lead, but Lafayette quickly came back and slowly built up an eight-point lead of its own. With less than four minutes remaining in the half, Columbia cut the lead to three on an outside shot from senior point guard Brett Loscalzo. Lafayette once again took control and stretched the spread back out to 35-23 to close the half.

The Lafayette defense swarmed the paint, keeping the ball out of the hands of both center Ben Nwachukwu and forward John Baumann. Columbia's big men went a combined 0-6 from the field in the first half. Nwachukwu did not play in the second period.

"When you come into the game, and you're shooting 28 percent from three, it's easy to say we're going to crowd the post, we're going to double-team," Jones said. "If we were shooting 40 percent from three they wouldn't be doing that."

Lafayette's offense came out hotter in the second half, stretching the lead to as high as 21. Columbia had no answer for Lafayette's Andrew Brown on defense. Despite playing limited minutes because of foul trouble, the five-foot-11-inch guard hit eight of his 14 attempts, including six from beyond the arc, on his way to 22 points. Down 59-38 with a little over 10 minutes remaining, the Lions began to find their way on offense, scoring 11 unanswered points to cut the lead to 10.

"We missed a couple of shots at the start of the second half, we got down, and I guess that sense of urgency kicked in," Loscalzo said.

The run was cut short by a stretch of offensive fouls that seemed to slow the team down, but Columbia once again fought back, cutting the Leopards' lead to nine with under five minutes remaining. But that was as close as the Lions got. The Leopards' offense picked up once again, stretching the lead back to double-digits for the rest of the game.

The Light Blue tried the press at times in the second half to speed up the tempo, but their inexperience with the system showed as Lafayette was able to break it easily. The Leopards were just as good in transition, consistently finding open players on the perimeter.

Poor defense was compounded by an inability to execute on offense. Although Columbia's three-point shooting picked up in the second half, the team shot 38 percent from the field and missed seven of its 20 free throw attempts.

"We told the guys in the second half that if they're going to crowd us, we're going to have to be able to throw the ball out of the post, make a play, make a three, drive and kick," Jones said. "We just did a poor job of doing that at times .... We just made poor decisions."

Baumann, the team's leading scorer, went the game without a single field goal, and Columbia was outscored 38-14 in the paint. Only Loscalzo and junior guard K.J. Matsui scored in double-digits for the Lions.

Columbia has six games left before opening Ivy League competition against Cornell, the preseason favorite, and Jones knows that there is much to fix. The team is missing depth with sophomore point guard Pat Foley sidelined indefinitely, and received another scare when a collision took sophomore guard Niko Scott out of Saturday's game.

"We're playing poorly," Jones said. "We've got to get to work. We're capable of playing a much better brand of basketball than we've played this year."

"There are a lot of teams, a lot of programs that go through similar ruts," he added. "It happens all the time, and you have to work your way through it, and you have to emphasize the basics, because you can't emphasize everything.