The Queen’s men’s basketball team lengthened their winning streak to five games on Friday against the York Lions in Toronto before it ended on Saturday night in Sudbury with a loss to the Laurentian Voyageurs.
The Gaels fell behind early in Friday’s game at York, trailing by 14 points at the end of the first quarter.
Assistant coach Duncan Cowan said despite York’s 10-9 record, they posed a threat.
“York, despite not being an overly successful team, has a lot of scoring ability,” he said.
But Queen’s sealed an 81-73 win with Mitch Leger, Ozren Opacic, Dan Bannister and Baris Ondul all reaching double-digit points.
Saturday’s game saw the opposite occur. Though the Gaels were leading by two after the first quarter, they were in a seven point hole by halftime. Three foul shots from Opacic brought the game within three late in the fourth quarter but Laurentian answered with two free throws for a 79-74 win.
Cowan said Laurentian outworked the Gaels.
“They had great energy [and a] great home crowd,” he said. “We got beaten up on the rebounds badly. Laurentian isn’t that big, but they worked harder than us.”
Cowan said the previous night’s comeback effort left the Gaels fatigued.
“We were a bit sluggish,” he said. “When you are down the night before, you are spending a lot of energy fighting back” The weekend leaves the Gaels in third place in the OUA East.
“We aren’t consistent all the time like the elite teams, it takes a lot of experience and hard work to get there,” Cowan said. “We’re close, but we aren’t there yet.”
The Gaels head to Ottawa this weekend to face the second-ranked Carleton Ravens and the seventh-ranked Ottawa Gee-Gees.
Forward Mitch Leger said the team’s bad habits will be costly if they appear next weekend.
“One week we play strong defence then the next week we get run all over. For whatever reason we came out flat in both games [this weekend],” he said.
Carleton, who have won six of the last seven national championships, beat the Gaels 85-43 in the teams’ last meeting in February.
“If we don’t show up with our A game we are going to get beat,” Leger said. “[It’s] not fun to get embarrassed by Carleton. It would be nice to beat them.”
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