DeKALB, Ill. – Halfway through the non-conference portion of the 2019-20 season, Longwood men's basketball is sitting pretty.
 
After a brutally physical road matchup at Northern Illinois (3-2) Monday night, however, they may not be feeling that way.
 
Playing their fourth game in seven days, the Lancers (7-2) saw their three-game win streak snapped at the hands of an oversized Husky team, 65-48, for their first loss since Nov. 8. That loss put an end to a dominant stretch in which Longwood outscored its past three opponents by 21.3 points per game and in turn extended Northern Illinois' win streak to three at the NIU Convocation Center.
 
"For me, the thing I would say about tonight is we didn't play particularly well, and we certainly didn't play well on the offensive end," Longwood head coach Griff Aldrich said. "We had 17 turnovers, and Shabooty [Phillips] had seven, but I can live with mistakes. Shabooty's trying to get in there and make plays and make things happen, but what I can't live with is they out-competed us tonight.
 
"I thought Jordan [Cintron] and Shabooty probably were the only two out there tonight that I thought really competed the whole game. We were on our heels to start, we were tentative offensively and defensive, and you can't come in, certainly on the road, and be tentative."
 
Northern Illinois proved to be Longwood's second strongest opponent of the season, trailing only Nov. 8 opponent George Mason in the KenPom.com rankings, and used a strong effort in the post to overcome the Lancers.
 
Keying that effort was the towering senior tandem of Lacey James and Noah McCarty – standing at 6-8 and 6-9, respectively, and a stout 240 pounds apiece – who did the bulk of that work down low with matching double-doubles and a combined 22 points and 20 rebounds. James amassed four blocks and disrupted Longwood's interior game, while the Huskies' MAC-leading three-point defense stymied the Lancers' vaunted long-range attack on the perimeter.
 
That interior presence coupled with an off-shooting night proved to be too much for Longwood to overcome as the Lancers shot a season-low .281 (16-of-57) from the floor and just .241 (7-of-29) from three-point range. The 48 points marked Longwood's lowest scoring output since a 66-47 loss to eventual Big South champion Gardner-Webb on March 2, 2019.
 
"We didn't shoot the ball very well tonight. We turned it over, and you have nights like that," Aldrich said. "But what you should never have is a night where you get out-competed in the way we got out-competed tonight."
 
Cintron kept Longwood in the game with barrage of hustle plays and hard-fought buckets that sparked the Lancers throughout key points in the contest. He finished with a career-high 15 points and added eight rebounds, four steals and a block while matching another career high with 31 minutes. Phillips, meanwhile, scored six of his eight points in the second half on a pair of three-pointers.
 
However, despite those contributions, Northern Illinois broke the game open with an 11-0 run in the first half and rode that cushion to the final score. That surge took place during a four-minute span in the first quarter of the game and featured five points from the Mid-American Conference's No. 2 scorer Eugene German.
 
Longwood held German in check the rest of the way, limiting him to 10 points in his first sub-20-point game of the season. The senior guard hit just 3-of-11 shots from the field and 1-of-6 from three-point range, but the big-man duo of James and McCarty, along with a 14-point contribution off the bench from Darius Beane, made up the difference.
 
"In the first half they got in the lane on us almost every time they tried to drive the ball," Aldrich said. "Our ball-screen defense was very soft, and we didn't execute it very well. They rejected ball screens and got into the paint. We just weren't aggressive. That's disappointing, because frankly that's one thing you can control.
 
"That needs to become a calling card of Longwood basketball,that we're going to be aggressive. If you beat us, great, that's part of it and we can live with that. But what we can't live with is not giving a great effort or not really competing. Unfortunately I thought we were stuck with that. We cut it to nine there in the second half and you would have thought we were down 39. If you don't have the energy from the bench and on the court, you're not going to come out victorious."
 
Now the Lancers will get a seven-day break to recapture that energy before their next game, which sends them to the West Coast for back-to-back matchups against California foes UC Riverside and Pacific on Nov. 26 and 29. Those road games contests will take the Lancers to the midway point of a six-game road stretch, which will conclude with matchups at North Carolina A&T, Morgan State and Stetson from Dec. 4-15.
 
"It's a tough stretch we've just completed," Aldrich said. "And look, we're 4-2, and that's not anything to be ashamed of. These are two guarantee games we've lost, but I think the goal for us is we need to improve. We need to get better at various things. There's a lot of technical aspects, like ball-screen defense, that we have to get better at. We have to get honed in on some of our positioning on the defensive end. They did a good job with us defensively, and their switching really impacted us. We need to hone in on that."
 
#GoWood