No. 12 Trailblazers continue to lock strong after wire-to-wire win over Lincoln Trail

VINCENNES, Ind. – The No. 12-ranked Vincennes University Trailblazers are beginning to round into postseason shape as the 2022-23 regular season is quickly winding down, with the Trailblazers picking up another strong 86-60 win over Lincoln Trail Wednesday night.

Vincennes set the tone early Wednesday night, quickly jumping out to a 17-6 lead before extending their lead to 30-11 midway through the first half of play.

The Statesmen looked to answer back, but were only able to cut the margin down to 16 as VU rode into the halftime break holding a 43-25 lead.

The Trailblazers wanted to put the game away early in the second half, with VU using a 9-0 scoring run to grow their lead to 52-28 early in the second half.

Midway through the second half it appeared that VU had taken their foot off the gas too early as Lincoln Trail came storming back to cut the VU lead to 70-51.

Vincennes would regroup and finish out the game strong, not allowing Lincoln Trail to put together a late scoring run as VU came away with the big 86-60 home win over the Statesmen.

“Basketball is hard,” VU Hall of Fame Head Coach Todd Franklin said. “Lincoln Trail was a team that got votes in the Top-20 at the start of the season and they have nobody hurt. They are a bunch of older guys that have been around for a while. So, it’s not always going to be pretty. But beating those guys by 26, that’s about as pretty as it’s going to get.”

“We lost focus, got a little tired and winded, which we could have played through but when you are up 25 of 26 and they get up after you, we just lost a little bit of focus,” Franklin added. “We’ve got to do better because we have got to put 40 minutes together. But I thought tonight was a good win. If we would have hit some shots earlier, because they were trying to sell out and stop the post and it took us a little while to get some confidence to shoot it on the back end. But once we did that, it went from being up nine or 10 to up 19 or 20 and it wasn’t necessarily from playing better, it just held there because we weren’t busting the shot.”

“Play-wise on the floor at that point we were kind of controlling the game at that point,” Franklin said. “They couldn’t score and we were getting good shots. We didn’t have a problem getting a good shot, we just weren’t confident enough to hit the shot that we were getting. I thought we turned the defense up a little bit at the end of the first half. I thought we got some turnovers that ended up being buckets out of playing solid defense and not gambling.”

“Then I thought we handled the first part of the second half,” Franklin added. “Other than Michael, who did a pretty good job all night, but he had a couple of times where he went to sleep on Wickliffe. Mike’s used to guarding in the post and he did, but he had two mental breakdowns and Wickliffe ended up with two threes. That was about the only six points they had in the first five minutes of the second half.”

“We came out and wanted to make sure that this goes up instead of down and we went from 19 to up 25 or 26,” Franklin said. “I thought we came out and handled that and then essentially it’s over once you come out and have that start to the second half. It was good. Good for us. I think we are trying to move forward. Our deal right now is to win a championship and we are not talking about a little championship, we’re talking about the whole thing and I think we can. But I thought we played well tonight. We shot a good percentage even though we weren’t great from three. Turnovers were really not very high except for that one bad spurt. We ended up with 11, it would have been down to about six or seven if not for that one stretch when we got tired and slung the ball around. The majority of the game was pretty clean on our part. ”

“We’ve got to keep getting better and we’ve got to play with confidence,” Franklin added. “At times we are. But it’s just the accountability of not taking plays off. We are pushing that because we have to be able to put that 40 minutes of our best ball out there. But we are getting closer. We are a really good team and we need to have a really good week of work because we are getting ready to go into a good cluster of games. SWIC on Wednesday, at Wabash on Saturday and Olney here Tuesday, so it’s like a mini tournament, before the tournament. That’s how we are looking at it. We are going to prepare for these last three games like we are preparing for the District Tournament and in many ways for us it is. We are getting closer and closer to playing our way into Hutch. We are getting really close to punching that ticket and if we can get these next three wins, it’s going to be tough to keep us out at that point.”