Canes win big at Madison Square Garden

By Kartik Krishnaiyer
Canes Rising Staff

Today at Madison Square Garden in New York in front of a national TV audience, Miami showed some of the same signs of trouble on offense that they demonstrated last Sunday against Clemson. But today the Canes turned up the defensive pressure and beat St John's by double digits.

Frank Haith made a change in the starting lineup today replacing James Dews with Brian Asbury. The Canes appeared to once again lack focus in the first half but the inspired post play of Julian Gamble coming off the bench plus some cold St John's shooting allowed Miami to build a ten point halftime lead. Miami did not score on its first eight possessions of the second half and St John's chipped the lead down to four.

But then Miami settled down and pushed the lead to as high as twenty two behind Lance Hurdle's best game of the season and the Canes ended up winning 70-56.

Some quick thoughts:

• DeQuan Jones has no shooting range but his athelticsm and lock down defense really helped the Canes today. For the first time this season, the national top 25 recruit made a difference.
  
• Cyrus McGowan had a rough outing missing lots of point blank shots and put backs.
• James Dews did some little things nicely today but still made too many mistakes to be trusted with starters minutes.
  
• Jack McClinton had a great game but in front of a building full of NBA scouts tried to do too much. At least this time he kept his emotions in check.
• Free throw shooting was better today but still not at the level it needs to be for the conference season.
  

All in all a positive win after an embarrasing loss last week, but this team must still improve substantially to finish in the upper half of the ACC. Winning on the road is never easy and Miami now has two true road wins against power conference teams, Kentucky and St John's. So that's no doubt a plus come selection sunday.