Huskies Come to Town...

Rebecca Pidgeon, in State and Main.
Married to David Mamet or she
would totally be into me.

State and Main (David Mamet) is one of my favorite movies of all time.  Set in a small Vermont town, the local high school team is nicknamed "The Huskies."  Anyway, they have a little thing that the locals say to each other all the time, which is, "Go You Huskies."  And whenever we play NIU, that's what I think of.

Anyhoo.  Mark Montgomery, the coach of the NIU Huskies, must feel like he fell off the side of the earth.  He left one of the most consistent and successful basketball programs in college basketball to head up to NIU, and now is enduring about as bad a season as a person can endure.  I'm sure he is focusing on the future...you'd have to be.

NIU was already having a really bad year when last week Montgomery dismissed one of the team's two good players from the team.  No one has said officially, but the player (Tim Toler) has had some issues with weight and he might have missed a class or something.  It sounds like it was more of a commitment issue.

And it might pay off in the long term.  In the short term, it just makes a bad situation worse.

NIU has an RPI of 335.  There are only 344 teams in D1 basketball.  So that gives you some perspective.  They are 2-18 with only 1 D1 win, and that was over CMU in DeKalb.  They are winless on the road.  In their cross over games, they lost @Kent by 34 and at home to Buffalo by 15 and Ohio by 9.

They are truly a very bad basketball team.

And yet, here I sit on the morning of the game, thinking what every fan thinks before his team plays a team like this.  Please don't let us lose to these guys.

Because just like the losing streak at WMU had to come to an end someday, and it did in spectacular fashion last week....just like Temple had to break their losing streak against someone (football reference) and they did...well, NIU won't suck forever and let it not start to turn around today.

There's no reason to go into the stats to much.  NIU has the stats of a 2-18 team.  They are 11th in the MAC in offensive efficiency and 12th in defensive efficiency.  They are the worst shooting team in the MAC and 11th in defending the shot.  They are the 5th worst team in all of D1 in turning the ball over.  If you want some relative strengths, they do get to the free throw line but they fail to convert, and have the 10th best FT% in the conference.  They are good on the offensive boards---even when looking at a percentage of missed shots.  (Raw rebounding totals for a team that misses this much are misleading).

Defensively, they are a train wreck.  They are good on the boards, but they are 10th, 11th, or 12th in almost everything.

College Basketball Stats

Note.  Those are all conference games and Toler played in half of the games.

Repeating. Please don't let us lose to these guys.

Individually, their remaining scorer is Abdel Nader, who is scoring 11 points a game.  He is a 6'7" FR, and it has to be noted that he is working VERY HARD to get those 11 points.  Dude is leading the conference in possessions used and has an offensive rating of 81, which is lower than any Falcon regular.

After him, their next leading scorer is getting 6 points a game.

Of course, you wouldn't expect big scorers on the worst team in the MAC in scoring.

Anyway, it would be easy to go on and on with this....point is that with a win, BG can win their second straight game for the first time since before Thanksgiving.  They can get a win they need--everyone else is beating NIU--and they can start to build up their record.  That WMU win was huge, because each of the next 3 games is winnable.

But first, you have to beat a team you should beat.