During Saturday’s halftime performance, The Decatur Power Drillers had more thunderous power in their drumming than the Eastern men’s basketball team’s offense has in its last five games.

Even though Eastern beat Tennessee Martin 60-46 to end a four-game losing streak, its offense has more questions than answers right now.

The Panthers’ offense averaged 75.47 points per game in its first five match-ups this season; however, the last five games have been underperformed by the offense averaging 56 ppg.

The win could not hide the problems in putting the ball in the basket.

It seemed junior guard Tyler Laser scored 14 points faster than Usain Bolt blazing through the 100-meter dash.

Then, Tennessee Martin head coach Jason James called for more pressure on Laser.

“He is a good player,” James said. “Any clean look he gets, he is going to knock it out. We had to be more physical and active to keep the ball out of his hands.”

The Skyhawks were trapping Laser and getting in his face, which limited him to only seven points the rest of the game.

“We closed out their main guy, who was killing us the whole first half shooting threes,” Skyhawks’ freshman forward Ron Spencer said. “We just definitely had to contain him and play harder defense to get more rebounds and make shots. That’s what we did until the end.”

After the Skyhawks made the adjustment, Laser did not score for 10 minutes and missed six straight shots. It worked like when Murray State held Laser to five points on Thursday.

Another problem was turnovers.

In the first half, sophomore guard Jeremy Granger tried hitting teammate Edin Suljic for an alley-oop, but it was too high for Suljic to grab it for a jam.

Spencer then drove to the basket on a fast break and Laser fouled him. He hit two free throws to close the deficit to seven.

Eastern had 17 turnovers, and 18 against both Murray State and Morehead State.

The third problem has been the Panthers’ shooting. Eastern shot 40 percent on Saturday and are averaging 40.1 percent from the field the last five contests, 4.1 percent below its season mark.

“We’ve got to hit the open man,” junior guard Curry McKinney said. “Sometimes, we are missing the open players. We are walking the ball up sometimes and we are trying to make it more fluent.”

The comeback the Skyhawks were staging greatly worried Eastern’s head coach Mike Miller, as Tennessee Martin closed the game to 43-42 with 7:56 remaining.

He said junior forward Benzor Simmons had 35 points against Evanseville this year, while teammates Marquis Weddle and Reuben Clayton can break out as well.

“If they were all able to get going, we probably wouldn’t have had enough to hold on,”

Miller said.

On a positive note, Eastern’s defense has continued playing well by creating turnovers and holding opponents under their season scoring averages.

Spencer said the Panthers’ full court press early in the game disrupted his team’s offense. Miller also switched to man-to-man to help.

Miller knows his squad has to score more than Saturday’s effort, or it will lose more games.

“It looked like we were going to play a little better in a flow, and then it got choppy,” Miller said. “A part of it was going to be mental approach (Saturday) was we needed to win, and we got a little tight at times and tried to be too fine with passes and shots. You can’t play like that.”

No you cannot, coach. Hopefully, the offense will wake up on Thursday.

Bob Bajek can be reached at 581-7944 or rtbajek@eiu.edu.