Chris Silva scored 2 points. South Carolina won a road SEC game. How?
Chris Silva was the hero in the opener, had a double-double for an encore and dominated his position in South Carolina’s third SEC game. The all-league senior forward might have had an underwhelming nonconference season, but he entered Wednesday looking again like a Player of the Year candidate.
Vanderbilt coach Bryce Drew knew it. Before his Commodores took on the Gamecocks, Drew said Silva was playing “as physical and as aggressive as anybody in the whole country” and he was concerned his team didn’t have the horses to match the 6-foot-9, 234-pounder’s energy.
But with 3:06 left at Memorial Gymnasium, Drew no longer had to worry. Vandy was leading the game — and Silva was gone. The guy who dropped 27 points on the Commodores a year earlier was leaving the floor with one of the worst stat lines of his career — 13 minutes, two points. three rebounds, three turnovers, five fouls.
“We got nothing out of Chris,” said USC coach Frank Martin. “Nothing.”
Yet, for a fifth consecutive time, the Gamecocks won. They’re 4-0 in the SEC, a record shared only by third-ranked Tennessee. They’ve ended a five-game losing streak to the Commodores in Nashville.
And it all came with Silva’s fewest points since he was a sophomore. USC is now 7-13 all-time when Silva fouls out. It had dropped its previous two games when he totaled more fouls than points. The Gamecocks are 4-6 since the beginning of last season when Silva logs fewer than 20 minutes.
Neither Silva nor Maik Kotsar, his veteran frontcourt mate, made a field goal Wednesday. That had never happened before.
So how again did Carolina pull this off? Drew peeked at the stat sheet for answers.
“(A.J.) Lawson had a great game,” Drew said as he looked down and spotted the freshman’s 24 points. “Again, they made their free throws. 77 percent. It was a game of fouling and they made them and we didn’t.”
After Keyshawn Bryant (four) and Silva (one) missed five consecutive FTs, the Gamecocks made 12 straight over the final 3:17, none more important than Lawson’s at the 23-second mark to put USC ahead 72-71.
“I heard the crowd cheering real loud,” Lawson said. “I was trying to stay focused and calm. My teammates were encouraging me and I just felt confident when I was shooting them.”
The Commodores, who entered as 71 percent free-throw shooters, missed seven of their 18 second-half attempts.
Silva has built a reputation on trips to the line, but he was especially ineffective Wednesday against Vandy’s hard post-traps. Martin adjusted by spreading the floor. Dumps inside to Silva and Kotsar were replaced by downhill attacks by Lawson, Bryant and Hassani Gravett.
That trio combined for 54 points, 28 coming from free throws, dunks and layups.
“Once we were getting nothing out of Chris and nothing out of Maik,” Martin said, “I decided to kind of open the floor. It was a counter to our post-ups, where we tried to attack the paint off the bounce. We did that.”
Gravett scored all 17 of his points in the final 12:26. Felipe Haase scored all nine of his in the final 9:09, including a game-tying 3 at the 6:41 mark.
“It’s a matter of being resilient, being a team, not depending on just one individual,” Martin said. “Don’t get me wrong, we need Chris to play well. We need him to not commit all the fouls he committed today. ... We got no production — nothing — from him and Maik Kotsar.
“Neither one of them played well for us today, and yet we go on the road and we scrap and we fight and find a way to win.”
NEXT GAME
Who: South Carolina (9-7, 4-0 SEC) at LSU (13-3, 3-0)
When: 6 p.m. Saturday
Where: Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
TV: SEC Network
This story was originally published January 17, 2019 at 9:22 AM.
