COLCHESTER, Vt. – The Saint Anselm College men's basketball team came away with a 76-67 victory at Saint Michael's College on Thursday.
Saint Anselm, the third-ranked team in the East Region according to the D2SIDA East Region Media Poll, improves to 11-5 on the year and to 7-4 against Northeast-10 Conference opponents. Saint Michael's drops to 5-12 overall and to 1-9 versus the league.
Four reached double-digit point totals for Saint Anselm, including a team-high 19 points from senior Miles Tention (Palo Alto, Calif.). As a team, the Hawks made 12 of their 21 three-point attempts and handed out 23 assists in total, reaching season-high marks in both statistics.
Senior Chris Paul (Highland Mills, N.Y.) kept up his streak of games with at least 10 points, scoring that exact amount against the Purple Knights, while tying sophomore Matt Becker (Fairfield, Conn.) for the team lead with 11 rebounds. Paul's eight assists was a career-high and he crossed 1,700 points in a Saint Anselm uniform, finishing with 1,703 points across 108 games.
Senior Alonzo Jackson (Medford, Mass.) produced 13 points, eight rebounds and four blocks off the bench and junior Tyler Arbuckle (Bristol, Conn.) posted 12 in the winning effort. Arbuckle also handed out nine assists, a career-high figure, while the four rejections for Jackson tie a personal-best mark. He now has 72 career blocks, tying Branimir Zeko '10 for fourth place all-time.
Senior Gustav Suhr-Jessen (Virum, Denmark) and junior Matt Relihan (Lynnfield, Mass.) scored seven and six points, respectively. Head Coach Keith Dickson, in his 36th year on the Hilltop, won his 675th career game and now owns an all-time record of 675-347 (.660).
Down by an 11-10 margin in the first half, the Hawks scored 10 points in a row with the help of five free throws to build a 20-11 lead with 10:45 left in the opener. The Purple Knights responded to take a one-point lead with 5:57 to go, 23-22, before Relihan scored six consecutive points for Saint Anselm off back-to-back three's.
A late two-point lead for the hosts, built by a 9-0 scoring run, was answered by four points in the first half's final 46 seconds by Saint Anselm to take a 34-32 lead at the break. Saint Michael's shot a full 10 percentage points higher than the Hawks, making 43.3% of its shots from the floor in the first half, but the Hawks poured home five three's to build its narrow lead.
Ahead by just three points only minutes in to the second half, the Hawks exploded following an Arbuckle three-ball with six consecutive points by Jackson that pushed Saint Anselm ahead, 51-41, with 11:16 left on the clock. Tention kept up the strong scoring stretch for the Hawks, producing six consecutive points of his own with two treys with less than 10 minutes to go.
Patrick Gardner, one of the leading scorers in the NE10, responded for Saint Michael's by making it a two-score game with 3:07 remaining – his jumper the Hawks lead to 71-65. With the score at 73-67 with 2:13 left, a clutch Tention three-point basket with just under two minutes left provided an extra cushion for the Hawks – neither team would score after that point.
Gardner scored 23 points, shooting 10-of-20, and hauled in 11 rebounds with three blocks in the losing effort.
Saint Anselm heads to Southern Connecticut State on Saturday, Jan. 29 at 3:30 p.m.
