Being .500 has never felt so good for the Huskies.
Riding a team effort where four different players scored between 14 and 15 points, Northeastern pushed the pace on offense and turned up the pressure on the other end of the floor to claim their first victory of the young season in a 75-64 win over Yale in New Haven.
Those 75 points are more than Northeastern scored in any game last season, and the most they’ve netted in a contest since January 2024.
The offensive output was a result of the Huskies’ effort to get the ball down the floor quickly all game and to generate turnovers by hounding the Bulldogs on the defensive end. The Huskies had 75 possessions Friday night, their most in a game in two years, and tallied 11 steals, their most since February 2023.
The home team, meanwhile, came in with the same gameplan of playing with speed and looking for transition scores, and Yale ended up forcing as many turnovers as Northeastern did (19) and recording more steals (12). The difference was that the Huskies took better advantage of their opportunities, shooting 28-for-62 (45%) from the field, while the Bulldogs went 25-for-68 (37%).
Yirsy Quéliz and Morgan Matthews co-led Northeastern with 15 points each, but Camryn Collins and Nariyah Simmons were not far behind, notching 14 points apiece. Quéliz was all over the court throughout the night, draining a number of smooth jump shots, while Matthews played most of the game despite coming off the bench to start, as in the opener on Monday.
In the frontcourt, Alyssa Staten replaced Justice Tramble in the starting lineup and grabbed nine rebounds in 20 minutes. Simmons and freshman Kailee Beaudion-Foliaki also chipped in five boards of their own, with four of Beaudion-Foliaki’s coming on the offensive end. That included one on a sequence at the end of the first quarter where the Huskies collected three offensive rebounds in five seconds, with Beaudion-Foliaki beating the buzzer on the fourth try.
Northeastern led by as many as 15 in the first half, although Yale whittled that margin down to four by halftime. The momentum continued for the Bulldogs out of the locker room, inching ahead with a couple of buckets by senior Kiley Capstraw, who served primarily as Yale’s point guard last year but has been converted to a power forward role for this season. Capstraw scored eight points in a row for Yale, capped off by a perfect trip to the free-throw line to tie the game at 47, but those would be the last points the Bulldogs would score in the third quarter.
The Huskies proceeded to net 16 unanswered points, a run spurred as much by Northeastern’s pace and defensive pressure as it was by Yale’s poor shot selection, with the Bulldogs going 0-for-12 from the floor. While Yale’s junior forward Luisa Vydrova finished the game 6-of-7 from the field, she didn’t put up a single shot during the third quarter, and the Bulldogs were instead trying to force up some ill-advised three-point attempts. From there, the lead never fell back to within single digits for the Huskies, and they cruised to an 11-point victory.
With the win, Northeastern snapped an 11-game road losing streak dating back to last December. While it was against a Yale team coming off of a 4-23 season and picked last in this year’s Ivy League preseason poll (the injury-hobbled Bulldogs also only had eight players available, but don’t expect the Huskies to feel bad for that), the victory is certainly a positive sign and serves as an early-season momentum boost. This is definitely a different Northeastern team from a season ago, in part simply because of the extra freedom their depth affords them — nine different Huskies played at least 10 minutes Friday night, and none had to play more than 31.
Northeastern now returns home for a Veterans Day matinee against a BU team looking for its own first win of the season. With a victory, the Huskies would be over .500 for the first time in almost two years.
Northeastern takes on rival BU at the Cabot Center on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Jordan Walsh and Jacob Phillips will have the call on WRBB Sports+.
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 here.