The Opening Tip
•   Just two games away from the postseason, Longwood heads to Liberty Thursday to renew the heated Big South rivalry.
•   Liberty has won the past two games at the Vines Center by a combined eight points, including last season's 55-53 victory on Jan. 19, 2016.
•   Liberty head coach Ritchie McKay wrote the foreword to the biography of Longwood head coach
Jayson Gee's family, "The Battle for Brandon", which details the Gee's struggle and journey to help their oldest son, Brandon, overcome mental illness.
•   Longwood is down to just seven available scholarship players after a rash of injuries.
Bryan Gee (overtraining syndrome),
Damarion Geter (foot),
Jahleem Montague (knee) and
Juan Munoz (knee) are all out with major injuries, while Kendrick Thompson is out for academic reasons.
Last Time Out
•   Big South double-doubles leader Ed Polite Jr. continued his dominance in the paint, scoring 18 points and grabbing 10 rebounds to help Radford outlast short-handed Longwood, 79-72, Saturday evening at the Dedmon Center.
•   Polite was one of four double-figure scorers for Radford, which used a nine-man rotation to outlast the six-man deployment from head coach
Jayson Gee's injury-depleted Lancers.
 •   Longwood's diminished squad threw all they had at their Commonwealth rival, trailing just 32-29 in rebounding margin, shooting .429 from the floor, .450 from three-point range and a season-best .833 from the free throw line.
•   All 72 of Longwood's points come from the starting five, including a career-high-matching 32 points from redshirt junior forward
Khris Lane.
Isaiah Walton scored 16, while
Darrion Allen added 14.
By The Numbers
•   Longwood ranks second in the Big South with 4.2 blocks per game and has three players —
Khris Lane (1.2 bpg.),
JaShaun Smith (1.1), and
Darrion Allen (0.8) ranked among the Big South's top 10 in blocks per game. Both Smith and Lane are on pace to crack Longwood's single-season top five in the Division I era for blocks per game.
•  Â
Khris Lane has scored in double digits in back-to-back games against Liberty, scoring 19 in the first meeting this season and 12 in his final meeting of the 2015-16 season. Lane averages 11.7 points per game in three career games against Liberty while shooting .500 (11-of-22) from the field and .545 (6-of-11) from three-point range.
•   In Longwood's last game, the Lancers got all 72 points from their starting five. Longwood starters have averaged 56.4 points per game this season, compared to just 11.1 per game from the bench.
•   Ravaged by injuries, the Lancers have leaned on the starting lineup to play 76.8 percent of the team's minutes this season. Three Longwood starters —
Darrion Allen (35.9 mpg.),
Khris Lane (34.0) and
Isaiah Walton (31.1) — all rank among the Big South's top 10 in minutes per game, including Walton who leads the conference.
•   Allen has been on the court for a team-high 930 minutes this season, which equates to 89.8 per - cent of available minutes.
•   After failing to reach double-digit scoring in three straight games for the first time all season from Jan. 26 through Feb. 1, Walton has now scored in double-digits in five consecutive games. He has two 20-point oubursts during that stretch while averaging a team-high 18.4 points per game.
•   Walton's 13.9 points per game this season rank as the second-best scoring clip for a first-year Longwood player in the Division I era. He trails only former UAB transfer Quincy Taylor, who averaged 17.2 points per game as a redshirt senior in 2014-15, on that Longwood list.
#GoWood
