Men’s basketball took home their second win of the season against William & Mary, with a close 95-89 victory Saturday.
Fifth-year senior guard James Bishop IV led the team with 32 points while shooting 44.4 percent from the field, going 8-18. Bishop also successfully sunk 15 out of 16 of his attempted free throws, the most on the team.
William & Mary dominated the majority of the first half, firing 21 3-point shots, connecting on eight of them and building a 21-30 point lead with 8:50 left in the first half. But the Revs moved to close the point gap, going 3-9 on threes and 12-29 on field goals. With just 51 seconds left in the first half, redshirt sophomore guard Maximus Edwards threw an outlet pass to freshman guard Trey Autry after coming down with a strong rebound, who laid it up for two, allowing the Revs to pull ahead, 43-42.
After earning A-10 Rookie of the Year last season, Edwards is continuing to perform well early in the season. He finished with a double-double in the Revs’ first game of the season Saturday afternoon, scoring 15 points and coming down with 11 rebounds. Playing 27 minutes, the second-most of any Rev, Edwards remains an essential piece to the Revs’ potential success.
“We have a lot of guys that can score the ball,” Edwards said. “So if I’m not scoring, you know, we just have to do it on the defensive end, and if the ball’s coming, I just have to make the right play on offense.”
Redshirt freshman guard Garrett Johnson was also crucial to the win, sinking all six free throws en route to a 15-point night after his collegiate debut against Stonehill on Nov. 6, where he scored 21 points. His strong performance Saturday marked the beginning of his collegiate career after he withdrew from Princeton after a benign tumor was discovered in his hip, which led him to nine rounds of chemotherapy over two-and-a-half years.
“I’m really happy for Garrett,” Head Coach Chris Caputo said of Johnson’s performance against Stonehill. “I said, listen, don’t feel like you got to do that every night. Like you just got to get better, play well, do your job. You know, don’t feel like there’s any added pressure because some eyes are on you.”
The Revs took off in the second half, hitting 59.3 percent of their field goals. They also capitalized on their opportunities at the charity stripe, going 17-20. Despite the Revs leading the entire half, the Tribe was able to close the gap significantly in just the last few minutes of the game, shrinking the GW lead from 14 to 6 in just under a minute. Bishop turned the ball over three times between the last 0:54 and 0:12, allowing William & Mary to gain back 8 points with the Revs scrambling to hold onto the ball.
“We got to do, again, a little bit better job of working on some of those press break situations,” Caputo said of facing press defense late in games.
Coming up, the Revs will attempt to go 3-0 against Hofstra at the Smith Center on Tuesday night with tipoff set for 7 p.m. The Revs are out for revenge after falling to Hofstra last season despite Bishop scoring his career-high 44 points.
