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After scoring just 23 points in the first half, the Providence Friars romped for 50 in the second to defeat the Albany Great Danes on Tuesday night. The Friars won 73-43 to improve to 9-3 on the season and have won two in a row and six of their last seven.
Providence struggled mightily in the first half and that’s probably putting it mildly. They shot 7-for-29 from the field and 3-for-10 from 3-point range. The leading scorer was David Duke and he had just five points. They scored just 0.697 points per possession and trailed for 13:35 of the opening 20 minutes. They held a lead for just 2:27 and committed six turnovers on their 33 possessions.
Albany really wasn’t much better as they actually trailed Providence 23-20 at the break. They scored just 0.588 points per possession, coughed it up 13 times on 34 possessions and yet still managed to hold a lead for a big chunk of the first half. Which is to say, they probably got lucky that most of Providence’s shots weren’t falling. Well, the downside to that is in the second half, the shots were falling.
The Friars shot 60.7 percent on their 28 field goal attempts in the second half. It saw their PPP mark shoot all the way up to 1.25, as they dropped 50 thanks in large part to Alpha Diallo and Maliek White, who scored a combined 28 points. Diallo led with 16 in the second half while White had 12. Jimmy Nichols Jr. had six, and no other Friars had more than four. But, nine total players scored at least a point in the half. So it was very much a collaborative effort.
Diallo led both sides in scoring on the whole with 12 points. White had 16 as they stood as the only double figures scorers on both sides. Albany couldn’t get anybody to have more than eight points, as Ahmad Clark and Adam Lulka led with eight apiece.
Providence is now 9-3 on the year and they have just one nonconference test left before Big East play begins. That test will come on Friday, their third game in six days, against the Texas Longhorns. The Longhorns are the fourth Top 100 KenPom team they’ll have faced in the nonconference slate (as of writing) and the second-highest, with the Michigan Wolverines being the highest (4th). It will prove to be a fascinating road test as the Longhorns, 7-3, have looked pretty good this season in spots.