City Six recap: La Salle upsets Richmond, Drexel beats William & Mary, St. Joe’s loses 7th straight A-10 game

La Salle head coach Ashley Howard hoped that a win snapping Dayton’s 20-game Atlantic 10 winning streak would be a turning point, but a victory over Fordham and three straight double-digit losses followed.

It looked like the Dayton upset was lightning in a bottle, but the Explorers struck again on Saturday against Richmond. La Salle defeated the Spiders, 84-78 at the Robins Center.

“Just excited for my guys,” Howard said. “I thought we came out with unbelievable energy and it manifested through the entire game.”

La Salle (7-8, 4-4 A-10) played so well offensively that it was able to make up for 18 turnovers. The Explorers shot 57% while holding a dangerous Richmond (9-4, 3-2) offense to 41%.

Howard pressed the right buttons again with his starting lineup. Sherif Kenney earned his third start and led the team with 17 points and four assists. Howard said the lineup changes are based on who performs the best at practice.

Jared Kimbrough came off the bench and followed up his best collegiate performance with another stellar outing. He had 12 points, 9 rebounds, and was a team-high plus-14 in 29 minutes.

La Salle is now .500 in conference play with wins over the A-10 preseason favorite (Richmond) and the team picked third (Dayton). Things are looking up at La Salle, but now the key is consistency.

“It’s been our energy,” Howard said. “We’ve had games where we struggle to manufacture offense, and we get down early. We didn’t muster up the energy in those games to even make those games competitive and put up a fight. Today, I felt like we were able to stay locked in, continue to bring energy and then sustain it for 40 minutes.”

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St. Joseph’s was losing bodies Saturday before and during its Atlantic 10 Conference rematch against George Mason and it wound up hurting the Hawks more on the defensive end.

The Hawks narrowed a 10-point deficit to one with 8 minutes to play, but the Patriots knocked down seven of their last eight shots from the floor to walk out of Hagan Arena with a 71-62 victory.

St. Joe’s (1-12, 0-7 A-10), which lost, 87-85, in double overtime at George Mason on Wednesday night, was led by 21 points from Taylor Funk. But Funk sat out a key 2-minute, 18-second stretch of the second half after picking up his fourth personal foul, which put stress on the Hawks’ offense.

Funk went to the bench with less than eight minutes left and George Mason (8-6, 4-4) hit its next five shots in a 12-4 run that extended its lead to 60-51 with 4:47 remaining.

St. Joe’s would get as close as six when Jadrian Tracey’s free throw made it 62-56 with 3:37 to play, but Jordan Miller’s dunk and Tyler Kolek’s layup got the lead back to 10 with 2:23 left.

“Offensive rebounds, blow-bys, rotations, guys not in a stance, it’s all the same things that happen when you’re trying to expend energy to get back,” Hawks coach Billy Lange said. “Then you have to actually now try to seize the game and do it, and we just couldn’t do it. You have to give credit to Mason.”

Jordan Hall scored all 15 of his points in the second half and added seven rebounds and six assists. The Hawks shot 27.8% in the first half and 35.2% for the game.

The Hawks played the final 12:14 of Saturday’s game after losing Jack Forrest with an apparent ankle injury after Forrest stepped on Funk’s foot while coming down with a rebound. Senior Anthony Longpre also missed the game with an ankle injury suffered in Wednesday night’s game.

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Drexel played William and Mary twice in games that had completely different results. One was a 24-point blowout win, and the other was a five-point loss.

The Dragons earned their second conference win by beating William & Mary (4-7, 2-4 CAA), 79-64.

“I thought our guys did a good job of not fouling,” head coach Zach Spiker said. “Last week, we fouled. This week, we didn’t.”

James Butler led the Dragons (7-5, 2-3) with 21 points and Camren Wynter added 19. Drexel shot just 6-of-19 from three but still finished the game shooting 59.6% overall from the field. The Dragons shot 25-for-33 (75.8%) on two-point shots, including 16-for-20 (80%) on layups.

“We put a focus on paint touches,” Spiker said. “We missed seven layups the last time we played this group.”