Bears Ground Raptors, 66-55

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY – The St. Joseph's College (Brooklyn) men's basketball team raced out to a double-digit lead and captured a 66-55 non-conference road triumph over Bard College on Saturday afternoon.

Senior Justin Gist (Brooklyn, NY/Newsome) netted 23 points, 18 coming in the first half, on 9-for-18 shooting to lead St. Joseph's (3-4). Freshmen forwards David Louison (Brooklyn, NY/St. Edmund's Prep) and Stephan Dimitrjevitch (Miami, FL/Varela) both added double-doubles in the victory. Louison recorded his third of the season with 19 points and game-high 12 rebounds and Dimitrjevitch scored 10 and pulled down 10 caroms for his second of the season.

Chris McNaughton scored 14 points off the bench to lead Bard (2-4). Siondueh Burnette added 12 points and Frank Stortini had a team-high nine rebounds.

The game went back and forth in the early minutes until St. Joseph's jumped out to a 11 point lead powered by a 16-4 run over five minute span, led off by a Gist trifecta and bookended by another jumper, accounting for eight of the points in the run.

The Bears held the lead firmly in double figures, carrying their largest lead into intermission 37-19. St. Joseph's shot 53 percent (16-for-30) and limited the Raptors to only eight FG (8-for-27) and only 1-for-13 from behind the arc.

In the second half, St. Joseph's continued to cruise, building as much as a 24 point lead, 54-30, with 8:13 left. But Bard started to connect from deep, after shooting just 1-for-18 for the game, connecting on three triples to assemble a 14-0 run to cut the lead to 54-44.

St. Joseph's immediately countered with a 10-0 run of their own, with four points each from Louison and Dimitrjevitch, and the lead was back up to 64-44 with under three minutes remaining.

Bard would make another charge and managed to cut the deficit to single digits, 64-55, with the Bears reserves in the game, but would run out of time with only 28 seconds remaining.

St. Joseph's won the battle of the boards 47-30, and converted 18 on the offensive end to 20 second chance points.  The Bears also outscored the Raptors in the paint, 34-26.

St. Joseph's continues a weekend road trip returning to the hardwood opening their Hudson Valley Men's Athletic Conference schedule facing the Culinary Institute of America tomorrow at 1 p.m. in Hyde Park, NY.