BOSTON — On the night of Valentine’s Day, Northeastern was looking to break up with their 15-game losing streak. But it was NC A&T’s center Chaniya “Baby Shaq” Clark who would break their hearts instead at the Cabot Center, in a 73-55 win for the visitors on Friday night.
Clark led the Aggies with 17 points, and every shot she made seemed to come at the worst possible time for the Huskies. The 6-foot-4 redshirt junior scored nine consecutive points at the beginning of the second quarter, as part of a larger 19-1 Aggies run that turned a one-point Northeastern lead into a 17-point deficit in less than seven minutes of game time.
All game, Clark was a force in the post, and the Huskies had to rely on freshman center Alyssa Staten — their only healthy player taller than 5-foot-10 — to try to counter her size. It was hard to keep track of how many times NC A&T ran the exact same play; an entry pass thrown just ahead of Clark so she could easily get by her defender and make a layup. Yet they were able to keep doing it again and again because the Huskies had no answer for her.
“I mean, she’s huge,” said Northeastern head coach Priscilla Edwards-Lloyd of Clark with a laugh. “And she’s skilled. Just from a paint perspective, she’s hard to guard. I thought Alyssa battled with her and did the best she could.”
The star of the show early on for the home team was redshirt junior guard Natalie Larrañaga, who netted 14 of the Huskies’ first 17 points of the game, including three three-pointers.
The three was what kept Northeastern in the game, especially as their inside shooting languished — through the first 17 minutes, they had only made one field goal from inside the arc.
The Huskies made five treys in total in the first half, with sophomore guard Yirsy Quéliz knocking down the other two, a precursor to the three-point explosion that came in the third quarter for the home team.
Northeastern went 5-for-6 from deep in the frame, with Larrañaga a perfect 3-for-3. Quéliz was also perfect, making both of her attempts, including a 35-footer to beat the buzzer at the end of the quarter that might just be the highlight of a season in which highlight-reel moments have been hard to come by.
The Huskies finished the game 11-for-27 from three, the most attempts and the most makes from deep in a game for the team this season.
“We’re just to a point where we have to be able to catch and shoot,” Edwards-Lloyd said. “Our personnel is 99 percent guards, so a lot of our ability to score is predicated off of catch-and-shoots.”
Despite all of that hot shooting, the margin built up by the Aggies’ strong second quarter was too much to overcome. Though Northeastern was able to whittle what had been a 20-point deficit down to nine near the start of the fourth quarter, they missed six of their last seven shots, allowing the margin to snowball towards the end of the game.
Redshirt sophomore guard Abby Jegede, the Huskies’ leading scorer on the season, did not have a good night, finishing with just six points and going 0-for-8 from three-point range.
The loss extended Northeastern’s losing streak to 16 games, which ties them with Eastern Michigan and Niagara for the longest active skid in the country.
Up next, the Huskies face Hofstra, a team on a six-game losing streak of their own. That game is likely Northeastern’s best remaining opportunity to get a win on their home floor, after Friday’s loss dropped them to an 0-9 record at Cabot Center on the season.
“[The message is] to recover, and be focused, and come out ready to battle,” Edwards-Lloyd said. “We’ll watch film, we’ll try to adjust to things, and we’ve just got to come out ready to go.”
The Huskies welcome the Hofstra Pride to the Cabot Center for their Black History Month Game on Sunday afternoon. Jordan Walsh and Samuel Glassman will have the call at 1 p.m. on WRBB Sports+.