Milwaukee Review....

The Falcons lost their fourth game with a margin of less than 5 points (against no wins in similar circumstances) and while it was on the road to a decent team, it probably was pretty disappointing to the team.

The reason for the disappointment is most likely to be the fact that the Falcons were in a position to win the game, with an 11 point lead with 11:52 left to play.  BG then was on the business end of an 18-6 run that ran over 7 minutes.  They had 3 FG's but missed other zero footers.  With 6:30 left Boyle hit a 3 to get the lead to 4, and then BG had a possession in which we had 2 O-Rebs and putback opportunities that did not go down, and then UWM got a layup to cut the lead to 2 and then BG turned it over and then Boyle hit another 3 to give the Panthers the lead.

BG had 2 chances in the final seconds, with the ball, to tie the lead or take the game, but needing a 2 to tie missed a jumper and then missed a 3 to tie on a buzzer shot.

NCAA Basketball

Its also too bad because for 33 minutes of the game, BG actually had a pretty good offensive performance, and with the struggles in that area, you hate to see that go to waste. It is only the 2nd time we have scored that many against a D1 team, and it was also our 2nd best shooting % of the season. Our points per possession (1.13) were the best D1 result of the season. The game had only 61 possessions, which is very slow, so 69 is a good number to score.

It follows that if 69 is good in 61 possessions, than allowing 72 in the same number of possessions is a poor number to allow. And, in fact, it was. We gave up 1.18 points per possession, which is worse than we did even against MSU and was only overshadowed by Duquesne. The Panthers only shot 47% from the field, but an old BG issue came back as they were 10-25 from beyond the arc, and made 14 more FTs than BG. (The Falcons had a terrible night at the free thrown line).

Those two things together make the difference between winning and losing.

College Basketball

There were a couple important individual stories. First, A'uston Calhoun had a career night, with 26 points and 8 rebounds coming off the bench. This is the kind of production that everyone hoped he had in him, and we are a completely different team when we get it from him. That's 2 games in a row in double figures after five straight out. Despite taking 21 shots, he had an offensive rating of 128. You just don't see that very much.

I know Calhoun really hasn't played much D1 basketball, and maybe it seemed like he was farther ahead than he was early in the year. Let's hope we see him get his sea legs and start to produce consistently, because we just get a lot better when he is.

Cam Black also had a really nice game. He had 10 points and 7 boards (with only one missed shot) in 25 minutes.

Scott Thomas, coming off an injury, had a double-double, (13/10) to go with 6 assists, 2 steals and no turnovers.

For a number of reasons, I am hoping we are seeing our team turn the corner. First, we have suffered from not getting consistent offensive production from any player. If we can get big numbers from Calhoun, and the consistent numbers from Thomas, Black and Brown, we are a much better team, and that's without anything from Danny McElroy.

We have 3 games left until conference play, and two of them are at home and winnable. It would be great to see us win 2-3 heading into league play, just to start to feel like we have a shot in tough games.