Albany falls on home floor to rival Stony Brook

ALBANY, NY- Stony Brook has swept the University at Albany men’s basketball team.

For the first time since the 2012-13 season, the Stony Brook Seawolves (13-10, 8-2) have swept the regular season series between the Seawolves and rival UAlbany (14-11, 5-5), when the two teams wrapped up the 2017 series Saturday night when the Seawolves defeated the Great Danes in front of a sold-out crowd of 4,538 at SEFCU Arena in the annual Big Purple Growl, 72-65.

The mantra of the America East is “win at home, win it all.”

And this season the Danes have had a little bit of a harder time doing that.

It was the fourth loss in 12 games for the Danes on their home floor this season, after they suffered all of one throughout the 2015-16 campaign. The Danes are 3-3 on the home floor in America East play.

“Stony Brook’s poise and maturity showed,” UAlbany Head Coach Will Brown said postgame. “We played with a tremendous lack of poise, especially on the offensive end.”

Albany’s lack of offensive flow and inability to get good shots forced them to shoot 40.4% from the field, the second lowest percentage the Danes have posted all year. Albany’s star backcourt duo of Joe Cremo and David Nichols didn’t produce; the combination scored a total of 24 points (came in averaging 34.3) and shot 28.6%, less than half their averaged combined shooting percentage of 62.5%.

Even after the game, Stony Brook Head Coach Jeff Boals complimented the two, saying he “didn’t know if there was a better duo in our league.”

Junior forward Greig Stire led the Danes with a career-high 15 points and had six rebounds, while Devonte Campbell had 12 points and six boards of his own.

Still, being .500 in the league and currently sitting fifth in the America East standings, Brown is not shocked at where his team is in their season-long development.

“Right now, and this is not because we lost the game, we are kind of where I expected we would be,” Brown said. “Whether anyone likes it or not, I am not surprised by it.”

Albany will have a very quick turnaround, practicing Sunday before traveling to Durham, New Hampshire, to visit the fourth-place Wildcats on Monday night where they will look to avoid another series sweep against a top-four America East team.