Boxscore

The Hokies once again blew a Bear Fight victory, and a chance at 100 points, seeing a 31-point lead with 5 minutes left slip to 15, but did move to 3-0 with a 95-80 win over the keydets of vmi on Thursday night at the Cassell.

The biggest news of the night was Erick Green reached the 1,000 point mark with a pull-up jumper early in the 2nd half. He became the 43rd Hokie to reach the 1,000 point mark. He finished with a game high 23 points, right at his average for the season.

The Hokies had extremely balanced scoring tonight. At the break, EG led the Tech with 11 points, while five other players had exactly 6 points. For the game, VT put five players in double digits (Green 23, Eddie 17, Raines 14, Brown 11, and C.J. Barksdale, who had just 2 points total in the first two games, added 11). Cadarian Raines had his second straight double-double with 10 rebounds to go with his 14 points. Walk-on Will Johnston added 9 points on 3/6 shooting from deep.

I said in the preview the run-and-gun keydets had to be hot from deep (they average 33 three-point attempts per game). They started 2/2 from deep and took a 6-2 lead… then missed their next 13 three-point attempts. During that span, the Hokies outscored the 42-17 and took a 44-23 lead. VT led 46-30 at the break.

Tech stretched that lead to as much as 31, ahead 88-57 with 5:18 to go in the game. At that time JJ pulled the starters and the subs proceeded to look like, well, walk-ons. The keydets went on a 16-0 run and forced JJ to put the starters back in with 2:15 to go. Erick Green answered with a jumper to kill the run and finally put the game away.

The Hokies shot over 50% for the game (36/68 – 53%) and 46% from deep (11/24).

If you are wondering about rebounding, Tech didn’t allow vmi a single offensive rebound in the first half and dominated the glass. vmi did get 10 second half offensive rebounds, but VT did still grab 78% of vmi’s misses, which is a great ratio. Eddie once again had a nice night on the glass with 8 rebounds and Joey van Zegeren added 8 boards.

Tech had a solid 21 fastbreak points against the keydets, which was nice to see. The Hokies had an eye-popping 85 possessions against the run-and-shoot vmi team, easily surpassing their 67 possession per game average.

vmi finished just 8/37 from deep (22%) and fell to 0-3 against Division I teams.

Even though both schools are military colleges, it wasn’t Military Appreciation Night (at least I don’t think it was since neither coach made an idiot of themself and wore combat fatigues).

The next game is Monday night at unc-g-spot at 7 PM.