Reminder: Highlights won’t be up until Niemo returns from vacation on Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Two words. De and fense. After a slow start, the Hokies dominated eastern michigan tonight, 71-50. Tech held the eagles to just 9 first-half points – the fewest allowed in the first half since the Hokies surrendered just 8 to north carolina central in January 2010, nearly two years ago.

Tech, winners of their last five, used a 16-0 run to close out the first half and take an 18-point lead (27-9) into the break. Seth’s stingy defense held emu scoreless for the final 8:38 of the opening half. Raines has really been playing well of late. He scored 10 points – his third double-digit performance in his last five games and two shy of his career-high of 12.

Junior guard Erick Green led an evenly balanced scoring effort for the Hokies with 12 points, while Cadarian Raines was the only other Hokie to score in double figures with 10. Senior Dorenzo Hudson added 8 points.

The Hokies opened the second half with a 6-0 run to extend their lead to 22 points. But the eagles would need just 7 minutes of the second half to match their first-half offensive output. From there, they played Tech pretty evenly, only being outscored 44-41 in the second half.

Unfortunately for emu, it found its offense too little too late. It wasn’t even close to being enough. Not even a little bit. The Hokies were too talented and too athletic. Plus, you have to figure that Seth opened it up just a bit and he certainly got his young guns some quality minutes.

Dorian Finney-Smith got his 31; C.J. Barksdale played 18 minutes, nabbed a game-high 10 rebounds and scored 6 points; Robert Brown had 17 minutes and 9 points; and Marquis Rankin registered career-highs in minutes (18) and points (6).