Da Bulls: A preview

Buffalo is an interesting case.  They are 7-6 in the MAC and 16-9 overall but with the best RPI in the MAC.  They had no bad non-conference losses--the worst is to #130 St. Bonaventure and there are losses to Wisconsin and Kentucky in there, too.  Their highest quality non-conference win was over #103 South Dakota State and they had 6 wins over teams with a 200+ RPI.

Even though they lost a ton of talent in the off-season, their conference struggles have been a little bit surprising to me.  When you look at it, they have beaten the weaker teams (Miami twice, NIU, @Ball State, @EMU) and then added in wins against WMU and Kent, both at home.  They have lost to CMU twice, Akron and Toledo (the top teams in the MAC) along with OU and WMU.  They are 3-4 on the road in conference with wins over Miami, EMU and Ball State.  If they beat BG, it will be their biggest MAC road win of the year.

UB is the #2 offensive team in the MAC...which means that the game will be what most of the BG games are, which is a battle between one of the top offenses in the MAC and the top defense.  On the other side, BG needs to get it mojo back after a very poor offensive game against Miami.  Buffalo is just average defensively, and BG will need to hit shots to take the pressure off the defensive side of the court.

UB is not a great shooting team.  In fact, the effective FG% you see below is 10th in the MAC.  They are 3rd in overall FG% (44.8%) but last in 3FG% (27%).  They build their offense on that solid 2FG shooting, taking great care of the ball, MAC-leading offensive rebounding and good success getting to the line.  They are 3rd in FT shooting as well.  This is the rare successful offensive team that is built on something other than shooting.

Flipping things around, UB is not great at defending the shot.  They do force decent turnovers, are not great on their own boards and they do get teams to the FT line a little bit, but not as much as they get to the line. BG needs to make shot at this level and take better care of the ball.  I will be interested to see if UB pressures BG, which has been a winning strategy for others.

Individually, the Bulls are led by Justin Moss, who is from Romulus, MI and took a pretty remarkable journey to end up in Buffalo.  He's a really good player...a 6'7" Junior who scores 20.5 PPG and gets 8.7 RPG, (MAC games only) and those are both #1 in the MAC.  The scoring is #22 in DI.  He's shooting 58%, leads the MAC in free throws and free throws attempted...he has 19 straight double figure games and 11 double-doubles this year...he's a likely leader for being MAC Player of the Year.

Shannon Evans is the second leading scorer at 14.2 PPG, shooting 41% and 27% with 3.5 assists per game,  which isn't terribly efficient.  Xavier Ford is scoring 11 PPG on 53% shooting and 6.1 RPG.  LaMonte Bearden leads the team with 4.3 assists per game.

OK, so what is the final analysis here?  First, BG has played really well off a loss and it would be great to see the same thing today.  I actually think BG will rally with a much stronger game at home.  The inside game between Holmes and Moss will be very interesting, but the key for BG is to get its guards to make some shots.  BG remains in the hunt for the high seeding but you can't lose 2 in a row at home this late in the year and expect that to happen.  Big game.