Box Score EVANSVILLE, Ind. – D.J. Ballentine scored 26 points to lead Evansville to an 84-70 victory over the Norfolk State men's basketball on Thursday evening at the Ford Center.
 
In the last contest of a three-game swing for the Spartans, NSU held a one-point advantage at the break. The Purple Aces, though, took control in the second half, hitting a bucket seven seconds into the stanza and never relinquishing the lead from there.
 
Evansville (9-2) led by as much as 17 late in the game and hit 30-of-50 (60.0 percent) overall. Ballentine hit 8-of-15 from the floor and 4-of-10 from long range to go with five assists and three boards.
 
Senior Jeff Short led the Spartans with 22 points on 8-of-16 shooting, part of a larger 26-of-50 overall effort from NSU, a healthy 52.0 percent clip. It also got double-digit efforts from junior Jonathan Wade with a career-best 14 points and from junior Preston Bungei with 10 points and four blocks. The duo combined to shoot 9-of-12 as NSU fell to 4-7 overall on the season.
 
Harris Brown hit 7-of-11 overall for 17 points for Evansville, while Egidijus Mockevicius tallied a double-double of 14 points (6-of-7 shooting) and 10 boards. They also helped the Purple Aces outscore the Spartans 42-32 in points in the paint.
 
Adam Wing scored six of Evansville's first eight points of the game, and the Purple Aces led 14-9 after Brown's 3-pointer from the left wing at the 11:13 mark. The Spartans then used an 11-4 run to go up by two, 20-18. Sophomore Jordan Butler's putback at 7:58 capped that scoring, which also included a pair of buckets from Bungei.
 
Short nailed a 3-pointer to put NSU up by three just a minute and a half later, a lead the Spartans still held when senior D'Shon Taylor completed a 3-point play at 3:37. Taylor made the free throw after the media timeout after also completing a backwards, off-balance layup to draw the foul. Then after Mockevicius hit two free throws to make it 32-31 in favor of the Spartans, Short drained a trey and also got a drive to the basket to fall for NSU's biggest lead of the game, 37-31, with a minute and a half left.
 
Brown, though, made a 3-pointer with just three seconds on the clock to cut the Spartan advantage to 37-36 going into the half.
 
The Purple Aces scored the first seven points of the second half and went ahead by nine, 48-39, when Ballentine connected on a trey at the 15:37 mark. The first double-digit lead of the game came at 11:13 on Willie Wiley's 3-point play, putting the Purple Aces up 55-45. Then after Short and Wade hit back-to-back buckets to cut the deficit to five, Evansville scored the next six points to push its lead back to double digits.
 
For the last eight and a half minutes of the game, the Spartans got no closer than nine points as Evansville outscored NSU 48-33 after intermission.
 
Evansville sank 7-of-15 from long range, while NSU countered by hitting 6-of-16. The Purple Aces also had 23 assists on their 30 buckets.
 
NSU will fly out to El Paso, Texas to compete in the Sun Bowl Invitational. The Spartans will face host UTEP on Monday at 9 p.m. EST and then UC Irvine or Sam Houston State on Tuesday.