BOSTON — Drexel junior guard Laine McGurk dropped 24 points and graduate student guard Amaris Baker added 21 as the Dragons extended their winning streak to five games in a 65-56 victory over Northeastern at the Cabot Center Sunday afternoon.
The Huskies got out to an early 7-2 lead in the contest when sophomore guard Camryn Collins sank a three-pointer from the left corner less than three minutes in. That would end up being Northeastern’s largest lead of the day, as well as the only three the Huskies would make all game, with the home team finishing 1-for-11 from deep on the afternoon.
Northeastern shot 23-for-65 (35%) from the field overall, their fourth-worst mark of the season, but that wasn’t even necessarily what doomed them in Sunday’s contest. The Huskies grabbed a season-high 20 offensive rebounds and were able to compensate for some of their misses with second-chance points. Drexel ultimately buried Northeastern with timely shots from McGurk and Baker, preventing the Huskies from ever recovering after giving up the lead in the first quarter.
With Northeastern up 12-11 with three minutes to go in the first, McGurk and Baker combined to finish the quarter on an 8-0 run to put Drexel up seven after 10 minutes, capped off by a McGurk buzzer-beating reverse layup on the fast break. Early in the second quarter, the two combined for a 10-0 run in less than two minutes of game time to give the Dragons a 16-point lead, which would be the team’s largest of the afternoon.
The Huskies were able to whittle the deficit to as little as seven early in the fourth quarter, but every time they tried to threaten Drexel’s advantage, Northeastern made a mistake of their own and got burned by the Dragons on the other end of the floor. The Huskies were down 56-47 when they missed four shots on one possession and saw McGurk immediately knock down a tough baseline jumper.
Later in the quarter, a coast-to-coast layup by Collins cut the deficit to five points, and McGurk responded by taking the ball to the rim herself and putting Drexel back up by seven. On the next offensive possession for the Dragons, Northeastern’s defense was able to force an out-of-bounds call with just four seconds left on the shot clock before committing a foul on the inbounds to reset it to 20. Drexel then got the ball into McGurk, who flung up a fadeaway jumper and canned it to put the Dragons up by nine.
While Baker hit the dagger — a three with two minutes to go that squashed any hope of a Huskies comeback — it was a tale of two halves for Drexel’s star duo. Baker had 17 of the Dragons’ 39 first-half points, while McGurk had 12 of her team’s 26 points in the second half.
“That’s a really good, disciplined, veteran, championship-caliber team,” said Northeastern head coach Priscilla Edwards-Lloyd of Drexel. “They have two dynamic guards that we had some trouble guarding today.”
While the Huskies finished the game with a season-low 12 turnovers, some of them came at inopportune times, and the Dragons scored 17 points off Northeastern’s giveaways.
“We’ve got to continue to find ways to not shoot ourselves in the foot,” Edwards-Lloyd said. “I think we played hard, but we’ve just got to be able to pair that with better execution.”
Some of the shots Drexel was able to make Sunday were tough looks that would have been difficult for any defense to guard, but Edwards-Lloyd said she is looking for improvement from her team more on that end of the floor than on the offensive side.
“I just think our defense needs to be better,” Edwards-Lloyd said. “[Our] scoring is what it is. We’ve got to find ways to get stops.”
The Huskies visit Stony Brook Friday night at 6:30 p.m. Stay tuned to WRBB for continued coverage of the 2025-26 women’s basketball season.
Jordan Walsh is a fifth-year student at Northeastern who has been with WRBB Sports since 2021, primarily covering men’s and women’s basketball. You can read all of his articles for WRBB here and find him on Twitter/X here.