AMHERST — After Northeastern erupted for 10 straight points as part of a 12-1 run late in the second half, the UMass men’s basketball team saw its double-digit lead with under seven minutes left evaporate as the clock ticked under two to go.

But as he had done all game, Minutemen sophomore Jaylen Curry had one more big shot in him. Good ball movement freed up Curry at the top of the key. When he got it, he had time to set his feet before firing his southpaw shot toward the hoop. The substandard Mullins Center crowd let out its loudest roar of the night as it swished through, putting the hosts back in front, 73-70, with a minute and a half remaining.

UMass’ defense didn’t allow a field goal the rest of the way, and Daniel Rivera capped off the contest with an emphatic two-handed slam to secure the Minutemen a 77-72 victory on Wednesday night.

“We’re slowly but surely becoming a basketball team,” UMass head coach Frank Martin said. “We’re starting to play consistently… We earned that win today. We came up with a monster defensive stop at the end of the game there, and we could have frozen. Instead, we attacked and spaced the court, and we got that breakaway dunk that was the separation of the game.”

Curry put up a game- and career-high 24 points including four 3s on 50 percent shooting to pace what has been a dormant UMass offense this season. Rivera scored 12 points, added 10 rebounds and blocked a whopping eight shots, Malek Abdelgowad notched his second straight double-double with 12 points and 11 rebounds while Rahsool Diggins and Marqui Worthy chipped in 10 points apiece for the Minutemen.

The scoring-by-committee output pleased Martin, and as an old-school coach, he enjoyed seeing everybody get involved in the scoring.

“That’s how I like the game played,” Martin said. “When you have one guy with a lot of points, a lot of shot attempts, that means the ball is in one person’s hands the whole time. As a guy that’s taken pride for 40 years on defending, the easiest team to defend is the one that you know where the ball is at. It's the easiest team to defend. A hard team to defend is when that ball doesn’t stop [moving] and you don’t know where the shots [are] coming from. Those teams are really, really difficult to prepare for. I think we’re playing well offensively.”

UMass built a 15-point lead in the first half, ripping off an 11-2 spurt that was fueled by Diggins and Curry. But following that run out of the under-four media timeout, Northeastern responded with 11 straight of its own. In the blink of an eye the Minutemen’s 15-point advantage was down to four.

Playing from in front hasn’t exactly gone the way UMass has hoped in non-conference play. Martin wants to see his team play hard the entire game, regardless of what the score is. Up big or down big, the Minutemen can’t tailor their play style to the scoreboard. They need to continue to do what best suits them, and that’s  play from inside out, and use their strength to wear teams down in the half court.

“We finished the first half like second graders,” Martin said, “which is a challenge for us right now. We play the score. We got guys that are just, you play well and they think they can take a play off, or they take a bad shot and gives the other team life. We're not there yet. We got to keep working there.”

Although the pesky Huskies got close, UMass kept its lead the entire game – as it played from ahead for 39 minutes, 25 seconds of game time.

The Minutemen shot 41 percent from the field (26-for-63), scored 15 points off 14 Northeastern turnovers, out-scored the Huskies 16-6 off the bench and got out in the open floor for 18 fastbreak points. UMass played with a purpose on both ends of the court on Wednesday, something it has lacked to do early on this season. Whether it was blocked shots (11), steals (12) or the 42 points in the second half, the Minutemen were strong in nearly all facets of the game.

But free-throw shooting was a struggle, and it almost came back to bite UMass once again. UMass missed 11 shots from the charity stripe in the second half alone, and it allowed Northeastern to scrape within striking distance. The Minutemen only average two less points per game than they did a year ago, but they would be averaging a lot more if they could shoot free throws and make layups – and Martin knows that.

“We’re playing good offense, man,” Martin said. “We’re averaging [two points] less than last year’s team, but we can't make free throws and we don’t make layups. We’d have more wins, and we’d have a lot more points, if we made free throws and layups – which tells me that the ball is moving and the right guys are [getting] good shots.”

UMass may not have been engaged for a full 40 minutes, but the Minutemen played well enough to earn the win – which have been hard to come by through the first month and a half of the year.

UMass (5-7) heads to Springfield on Saturday to play Arizona State at 4 p.m. in the Basketball Hall of Fame Classic at the MassMutual Center.