PEMBROKE — In the moment, the score was secondary. During a timeout in the second half of Saturday’s home contest against North Greenville, UNC Pembroke men’s basketball coach Drew Richards wasn’t pleased with his team about its defensive effort, and made his contempt known — loudly.

The Braves, who led by 13 during the timeout, responded in the ensuing minutes, pulling away to earn a 83-62 win over the Crusaders.

“We should always defend at a championship level, regardless of what the score is, if that’s what you want to be, and I didn’t think we were,” Richards said. “As many times as I tried to tell them in a somewhat calm voice, we didn’t respond. I didn’t think we had the energy on defense for the most part for most of the game, so hopefully something jolted them into defending and I thought we finally put a little more effort on defense.

The 13th-ranked Braves (16-1, 8-1 Conference Carolinas) held a 53-40 lead over North Greenville (1-14, 0-8 CC) during the timeout with 11:48 remaining. The Crusaders made a basket out of the timeout, but from that point the Braves went on an 18-5 run to take a 71-47 lead with 7:06 to play.

Bradlee Haskell and Javonte Waverly each scored seven points during the run.

Waverly was key all afternoon long for the Braves, scoring 22 points.

“My team’s still been confident in me,” Waverly said. “The first half of the season I didn’t have such a great half; my team’s been in there, giving me the ball, being able to pick me up and keeping the confidence flowing, and back-to-back I’ve just been playing well.”

Before the Braves’ mid-second-half run, UNCP had kept North Greenville at an arms length — but only an arms length — for most of the game after building a lead early.

The Braves jumped out to a 26-12 lead with 11:40 left in the first half, making 10 of their first 11 shots including a 3-for-3 mark from beyond the arc. Waverly scored eight points in the early stretch, including two 3s and a layup.

“We talked about in the locker room we wanted to get off to a good start,” Richards said. “Sometimes we’ve been a second-half team, sometimes we’ve been a first-half team — we’re hoping to get to where we’re just a good team.”

The teams played mostly evenly over the rest of the half, with North Greenville closing to 10 at 33-23 before trailing 40-25 at the break.

The Braves’ lead stayed around 10 to 15 points to start the second half as well, with the Crusaders trailing 50-40 just before a JuJuan Carr 3 for the Braves which preceded the flash point timeout.

Haskell scored 19 points with six rebounds and three assists for the Braves, Cortez Marion-Holmes had 11 points and seven rebounds and Elijah Cobb had nine points with four steals.

C.J. Jamison scored 13 points to lead North Greenville and Caleb Williams and John Haddock Rogers each netted 10.

Saturday’s game was the Braves’ first in a stretch of three games in five days, and four in eight; the rest of the stretch comes on the road, Monday at Erskine, Wednesday at Barton and Jan. 21 at Francis Marion.

“As far as road games are concerned, this is as tough a stretch as anybody could hope for in this league,” Richards said. “So any minute details that we’re not focused on, outside of our normal schedule, they’re going to be shown to light come grit and grind time.”