Archdeacon: Sharp-shooting Blakney fuels Flyers

Second-year guard joins rare company by making 5 of 5 3-pointers

This was not the first time he fed off the crowd as he made one shot after another.

Sunday afternoon at UD Arena, R.J. Blakney made all five of the three-point shots he attempted and finished with a career-high 19 points to lift the Dayton Flyers over Virginia Tech, 62-57.

» PHOTOS: Dayton vs. Virginia Tech

As the game progressed, the sell-out crowd cheered with anticipation every time he launched a three and especially when, with a defender in his face, he hit his final trey with 2:04 left after the Hokies had closed an 18-point deficit to just five.

His three helped UD reclaim the momentum and close out the victory.

Blakney’s 5-for-5 long range shooting ties efforts by Dyshawn Pierre (2012) and Darrell Davis (2014) for the second-best three point accuracy in a game in UD history. The top spot still belongs to Shawn Haughn, who went 8-for-8 against St. Louis in 1994.

But Blakney did more than just shoot. He had six rebounds, led the team with three steals and played some stellar defense as the Flyers rattled the Hokies into 13 turnovers – several coming off UD’s game-long press – and subpar long range shooting.

The crowd helped lift the team, Blakney said: “It gets everybody hyped. The fans are into it and it gives us a lot of energy. We love that.”

Back in Maryland, his mom, Dwuana “Dafne” Lee Blakney – a basketball legend herself as a standout player at the University of Maryland and as a pro and later a celebrated coach who won a high school state title and had top junior college teams, too – watched the game on ESPN with friends.

“I’m am so proud of R.J.’” she said afterward.

She loved how the crowd embraced her son’s effort. It reminded her of the first time her son heard cheers for his ability to shoot.

After her Maryland career – where her teams made the Final Four, the Elite Eight and two Sweet 16s and she scored 992 points – she played in Switzerland, Belgium, Israel and Greece.

Once she began coaching, she had R.J. and by the time he was seven, she had divorced and was raising him on her own with the help of her mom.

Basketball was her bond with her boy.

When he was a baby, she coached with him in an infant carrier she strapped to her shoulders. Later he sat on the bench and the subs on her girls’ teams looked after him. He rode the team bus to games and eventually, he got some court time himself.

“Her team would go in at halftime and I was just a little kid, so I’d grab a ball and go out on the court and shoot around ‘til the players came back out of the dressing rooms,” he remembered Sunday.

His mom remembered a little more.

“He’d make a couple shots and the fans would start cheering for him and that got him going,” she laughed. “R.J. liked to play in front of a crowd.

“Really, I think that’s one reason he chose Dayton. He wanted to play in front of those big crowds that really get behind the team.”

That’s certainly what happened Sunday.

And the fans especially embraced his effort because they had never seen the 6-foot-6 redshirt freshman shoot like that before.

He came into the game making just 27.3 percent of his attempts from three-point range this season and had missed all his three point efforts in the Flyers previous two games, against Northern Illinois and SMU.

“You’ve just got to have that next-game mentality,” Blakney said. “I just trusted in my ability and stayed in the moment. I never shied away.

“I tried to do what the team needed today. My teammates found me and I did my job knocking it down. Today, I just had confidence to take those shots.”

After the game, coach Anthony Grant had nothing but praise for Blakney: “R.J. is a really, really good basketball player. We think he has a tremendous upside. It was great to see him go out and show the rest of the country what he’s capable of.”

Yet even with the praise and that box score line worth framing, Blakney said he’s still second fiddle when it comes to basketball in his house:

“My mom still holds the top spot. She’s got the Final Four and all those great things from college and a pro career and she was a great coach. Her list is long. She played Olympic basketball. She traveled the world.

“I’m still trying to get there. I’m just working my way up to her.”

His mom disagreed with that: “That was a great performance today. A prime time performance. He has arrived.”

And she said she was not surprised. After all, he scored 1,800 points at St. Maria Goretti High School in Hagerstown, Maryland and then starred a season at a prep school in Connecticut.

“He’s always had the shooting piece to his game,” she said. “Once he gets it going, he can put on a show. I saw in at the high school level and when he was in prep school, too.”

She thought about those days and started to laugh:

“I saw it when he was a little kid at those halftimes, too. That’s when the crowd really got behind him.”

Sunday reminded her of that.

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