“We tie the score and they drive down the floor and shoot a layup,” WSU coach Scott Nagy said. “You can’t win games like that. And when you give up 58-percent shooting in the second half, you don’t deserve to win.”
The loss, coupled with first-place Valparaiso’s win at Milwaukee, eliminated the Raiders (19-10 overall, 10-6 Horizon League) from contention for a regular-season title and put them in a tie with NKU (19-10, 10-6) for fourth place.
WSU junior guard Mark Alstork rebounded from one of his worst games of the season to post game highs in points (24) and rebounds (eight), while Benzinger added 20 points.
The duo combined to post 29 points in the first half, but neither scored until Alstork hit a 3-pointer with 8:21 left in the game. By then the Raiders had squandered a 10-point lead against the hot-shooting Norse, who hit 17 of their final 28 shots.
“You could say that’s really good offense, but you could also say really bad defense, and I think that was the case,” Benzinger said. “We couldn’t get a stop when we needed to. That’s why we lost, our defense.”
NKU guard Cole Murray hit 5 of 10 3-pointers and was 8 of 14 overall for team-high 23 points, while Holland added 19 and McDonald had 18.
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A Steven Davis dunk with 17:16 remaining gave the Raiders their biggest lead at 47-37, but NKU erased it in less than seven minutes by making seven of its next 11 shots, including the final five, to draw even at 55-55 with 10:25 to go.
“We have to be a better team than that,” Alstork said. “We’re the older team. We can’t let things like that happen. We stopped playing aggressive and they were more physical. We just played soft.”
Alstork was 8 of 8 at the free-throw line to run his streak of consecutive makes to 26. His final two tied the game at 76-76 with 45 seconds to go, but the Norse scored the last seven points to complete the season sweep after beating the Raiders 83-79 at the Nutter Center on Feb. 4.
Wright State forced NKU into 10 turnovers in the first half while committing three of its own to build a 40-33 lead, but the Norse took better care of the ball in the second half with the Raiders bench depleted by an injury to Mark Hughes, one of the team’s top defenders.
“We were much more physical in the first half, and part of that was we wore down,” Nagy said. “When Mark Hughes got hurt, we just had such a short bench at that point and we were trying to play catch-up at that point because their bench is a lot deeper.”
Nagy did not have a prognosis on Hughes, but the thought is that the injury will cause him to miss some more time. Hughes missed four games earlier in the season when he sprained both ankles Jan. 7 against Youngstown State.
The Raiders return to action Friday night at home against Valparaiso. They Oakland by two games with two to go for the coveted No. 2 seed.
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