STARKVILLE — Quinndary Weatherspoon hasn’t climbed up the Mississippi State men’s basketball scoring ranks by living at the free throw line, but he solidified his place in the top 10 by doing just that.
With 18 points in a 98-87 win over Wofford Wednesday night, the senior guard from Canton surpassed Jamont Gordon for ninth all-time, now sitting at 1,564 career points. He is only 38 points behind Barry Stewart in eighth.
What made his performance against the Terriers (9-4) different was the 14 free throws. He went 14-for-15 from the free throw line while shooting just 2-for-10 from the field and 0-for-5 from 3-point range.
MSU coach Ben Howland thought his performance was a testament to toughness.
“I think he’s been to the line, 41, 45 times going into tonight and he got 15 tonight, I love that,” Howland said, actually underplaying it: Weatherspoon only had 37 free throw attempts entering Wednesday. “Great players get to the line. To get there 36 times and make 78 percent of them was big for us.”
At a certain point, it became Weatherspoon’s mission to get to the free throw line more than get a shot up.
“The coaching staff brought it to my attention, telling me they were in foul trouble,” he said. “I tried to take advantage of it and get to the line, that’s what I did.”
Weatherspoon also climbed up the school record books in steals. His one steal gave him 162 for his career, moving him from a tie for seventh with Timmy Bowers to a tie for sixth with Barry Stewart.
Holman is back
MSU’s lone senior in the front court, Aric Holman, has become known for his consistency. He is the type of player that MSU (10-1) can set in stone for a certain level of statistical performance on any given night in points, rebounds and often blocks.
A recent stretch proved to be the anomaly. Entering Wednesday, he had scored double-digit points just once in the last six games. That came to an emphatic end with 19 points against Wofford on 6-for-7 shooting.
“I played my role,” Holman said. “When it comes to needing another scorer, that’s when I step up. It was a big thing for those guys to play defense on their best offensive players, so I felt like I had to step up my role on the offensive end.”
Holman also contributed eight rebounds and four blocks. The four blocks gave him 170 for his career, still good for fifth all-time in school history but now 13 behind fourth-place Kalpatrick Wells.
Last second shot
The shot clock went dark with MSU up nine and fewer than 20 seconds left. A quality win was already in the Bulldogs’ grasp, yet Howland thinks the new system in college basketball demands teams to go for more.
The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) is a new metric the NCAA is using to replace Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) in its NCAA tournament selection process, and one of its factors is scoring margin.
The caveat to the scoring margin metric is it caps the margin for each game at 10 points; for example, whether a team wins a game by 11 points or 25, it receives credit for winning the game by 10 points. It is designed to discourage blowouts just in hopes of boosting the season scoring margin.
The flip side is teams are encouraged to do everything they can to reach that 10-point margin, as MSU did. Weatherspoon hurriedly fired a 3-pointer and missed, just for Reggie Perry to rebound it and score it in time for the crucial 10th and 11th point of victory margin.
“I apologized to the coach right away, but I was yelling at (Quinndary), I’ve explained to him, we have to win by 10,” Howland said. “He had an open layup and he’s pulling it out. I don’t like it, but when they look at the numbers, we want to make sure we’ve done everything we can to impress the committee.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter @Brett_Hudson
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