Men's Hoops Loses Opener

The Men's basketball team dropped its opener last night in Washington DC to Howard, 54-52, in what sounded like a battle between two teams putting out pretty flawed efforts.

The Falcons will get the chance to even the score at the opening of the Stroh Center next season.  As one who was disappointed that Howard would be the team to open the Stroh Center, I official apologize to the Bison.

The game itself was pretty slow, especially in the second half.  Just as an example, at 13:15 BG took a 42-39 lead.  NEITHER TEAM scored for 5:18....check out the play by play summary if you like....

Yes....the scoring drought spanned across two media timeouts.

BG shot 34.6% from the field.  They were only worse than that twice last season (Akron and Temple).  Furthermore, BG made only 2 of 16 from 3s, which means their effective field goal % was only 36.5%, which is just very poor and makes it very difficult to win.

For all that, BG had a chance to win or tie the game at the end.  Luke Kraus sunk a couple of free throws with :20 left to cut the lead to 2.  Howard missed both free throws, and BG came down and Dee Brown launched a 3 (which Todd Walker said was a good look), but he missed it.  BG fouled again, and Howard missed both FTs AGAIN, and BG still had 6 seconds and no time outs, and ran down the court.

What happened was Joe Jakubowski got into the lane and fell down and did not get a shot off.  According to Coach, he was supposed to draw the coverage and then pass the ball to Calhoun, but that's not what happened, and the Bison won the game.

Just to get the lowlights out of the way....

• BG missed all 9 3s in the second half.  Howard missed all 6 of theirs, meaning the teams were a collective 0-15.
• Howard missed 20 FTs, keeping BG in the game.
• A'uston Calhoun and Danny McElroy had particularly tough nights shooting the ball.
• BG was out-rebounded by 2.

Now, looking at the four factors for winning a basketball game (shooting, rebounding, FTs and turnovers), we get an idea where things fell apart.  Coach was concerned about giving up 16 offensive rebounds, but when you have the abundance of missed shots that you had in this game, you are going to get some higher rebounding numbers.  (Howard rebounded about 36% of their offensive rebounds, which is about 3-4% higher than normal.)  Similarly, the turnover percentage was on the low end of normal but not terribly out of line.

NCAA Basketball Stats

Now, there were some brights spots.

First, the defense.  As we can see, for all the struggles for the offense, the defense did hold Howard off the scoreboard.  We played man in the first half and zone in the first half, and were effective in both.  Certainly, on the defensive end, we played well enough to win.

Second, Scott Thomas had a really nice game, with 20 points (7 of 13 shooting) and 9 boards.

Third, Cam Black was good for his first collegiate game.  He had 10 points and 7 rebounds in 24 minutes.

Fourth, while Danny McElroy shot poorly, he did grab 10 rebounds in 23 minutes, 6 of them offensive.

So, the season goes on.  This was certainly a disappointing one to lose.  Coach said that we need to be tougher around the basket, and that was something Todd Walker mentioned as well.  While this was a game I think we should have won, I still like what I see in our program.  For this season, we have simply got to find ways to score more if we are going to compete.