Troy drops home game to UL-Lafayette

TROY – Troy put together one of its better efforts in Sun Belt play this season, but couldn’t close out a furious rally toward the end of the game.

Down 16 with four minutes left, the Trojans cut the lead to three with a minute to go, but ran out of gas in an 83-78 loss to UL-Lafayette.

Troy dropped to 7-15, 2-9 in Sun Belt play, and the Trojans are in last place in the Sun Belt East. ULL, which is competing for the West title, improved to 14-11, 8-3.

“We had a slow start, but we fought back and gave it our all and just came up a little bit short,” said Troy’s Emil Jones, who scored 19 with 13 rebounds.

Troy was down 75-59 with 4:04 left, and used full court pressure to get stops and cut the lead to 77-74 with 1:50 left and 78-75 with 1:09 left, but couldn’t finish it off despite the performance from Jones, as he tied career highs in points and rebounds, and a career-high 21 points from Justin Wright.

Will Weathers led Troy with 22 points. The Trojans were down 14-4 early, cut the halftime lead to 30-28, and cut ULL’s lead to 50-49 with 11:17 left, but the Ragin’ Cajuns got eight straight – all from Bryant Mbamalu – to lead 58-49 with nine minutes left.

That ended up being the key stretch of the game, when the Trojans couldn’t answer ULL’s scores.

“The real one glaring thing that sticks out to me was our inability to score at key times,” Troy head coach Don Maestri said. “It was a key time in the game where we needed to get points, and we were not able to do that. That’s the one thing that sticks out in my mind.”

Troy also couldn’t contain ULL’s Mbamalu, the 6-foot-2 sophomore guard who caught fire in the second half. Mbamalu scored just two points in the first half, but hit 9-of-10 shots in the second half and finished with a career-high 27. He was scoring 6.6 points per game coming in.

“He just had a big night,” Weathers said. “He was hitting shots in people’s faces, wide open shots, lay-up. He played out of his mind. We didn’t play defense like we should have. We’ve just got to back to practice and work harder.”

Maestri still feels like the confidence is down, though the effort was there and the performance just came up short against a bigger and more veteran ULL team.

“We’re still not playing fluid basketball,” Maestri said. “We seem to be pressing a lot and you can kind of feel it on the bench. We’re just in such a need of a win for a momentum boost and we haven’t been able to get one.”

Along with Mbamalu’s 27 points, ULL got 12 points each from Darshawn McClellan and Josh Brown, and 11 from Elfrid Payton.

Troy is off for a week before hosting Western Kentucky next Saturday at 1 p.m.