Men's Basketball Preview

With a short break in the football schedule, I wanted to take a minute to take a look forward to my other passion, which is Men's Basketball.  The season is coming up.

Obviously, it is has been a historically down period for our program.  I'm talking everything back to the WVU incident, with one good year in the 2009 season and one during the Chris Jans year.  Beyond that, it's mostly just mediocrity or worse.  We've only been on the plus side of .500 three times in that amount of time.  That's pretty hard to get your arms around.

We are not expected to make it 4 this year.

But, there's reason to be optimistic.  Maybe not for this year, but there is.  The reason for the long drought is (in my view) a lack of a critical mass of quality players.  When you play Akron, they just come at you in waves.  Then, you can develop them into a team that has the confidence that they can beat you in the last 8 minutes of a game.  You need guys coming off the bench who could start on other teams.  That's what you need.

The issue is that BG has only four players who have played any kind of minutes at all at the D1 level.  You have two who have not played competitively in over a year.  The team is just very, very young and I think that's going to make it difficult to compete.

Now, if you had to have a year in the MAC to do that, this would be it.  You had Dambrot leave the MAC and half his team, too.  They'll be back with Groce, but I don't think it will be this year.  A bunch of other players from the All-MAC teams left...if you had a year when you were going to be young and not perfect, this would be it.

The returning Falcons are solid, for sure.

Demajeo Wiggins is a good example.  Here's a guy who was a late recruit that Huger signed after he got the BG job.  He improved a lot in his sophomore year and they are pushing him to get even better.  I saw somewhere that Huger wants to see him be a 15/10 guy.  That would be something else, for sure.  He was a 10 and 8 guy last year, so it's not outside the realm of possibility.  We have some more size coming which should take some pressure off him.  He could do some of that just from free throw shooting.  His FT shooting went from 38% to 61% which is impressive.  If he gets a little better, teams won't be able to stop him by fouling him.

Rodrick Caldwell is a really solid PG.  He was just a freshmen last year and you could see real improvement.  In conference play, he scored 7.1 PPG shooting 41%, with about 1.5 assists per game, all of which were above his numbers for all games.  I look forward to seeing him continue to develop under the tutelage of our PG/head coach.  I think he has the capacity to be a top PG in the MAC, and the winning teams ALWAYS have a strong 1.

Dylan Frye was on the All-Freshmen team.  This kid is a gym rat and that's what you really want.  Someone who loves basketball.  He scored 9.8 in conference games in 26 minutes, shooting 44%, which is not too bad for a guard.  He shot 36% from 3, that obviously can improve.  BG has lacked outside scoring for some time and he I think he can help remedy that.

Antwon Lillard is also returning.  He's probably regressed a little bit since his freshmen year, but he's a good example of the kind of player I'm talking about.  You need starters and you need role players.  In conference play, in 21 minutes a game, he scored 7.8 a game with 3.5 rebounds.  He shot 43% and had more turnovers than assists.  If he can cut down on the turnovers and improve the shooting just a little big (possibly with better shot selection, he was terrible from 3), he becomes a really good player who can give you 20 solid minutes in conference play.

Matt Fox is also back.  Matt started as a walk on and has played his way into a scholarship, which he clearly earned.  He's a solid player fundamentally who can get on a hot streak from the 3.

So, that's it.  That's the returning guys.  Just not very many of them is all, and none of them a proven player as a star, as an All-MAC performer.

Now, the newcomers.  Again, much of this is potential, but Coach Huger was telling people it was the best recruiting class in OHIO this year.  Now look, he's the coach, right, so you know how that works.  I'd be happy if our class was better than Akron, Kent, Ohio and Toledo.  I don't need to beat Xavier or UC.  Not that I am against it.  But we don't need it.

I'm not going to go through each one of these guys because I don't know anything about them other than what we knew when they signed.  I'll just provide a link to the BG roster and you can read their bios.

A couple of overall impressions.

First, it appears to me that we have some playmakers in that mix, and that's something we have been sorely lacking.

There's also some size.  You have Gadson and Koch both of whom are big guys, something BG has also sorely lacked over the recent years.

Note that Kulackovskis tore his ACL and won't play this season.

Also, don't forget Justin Turner red-shirted last year and so did Uju, so they are new to the program.

Anyway, on paper it would appear that this is the best group of talent to enter the BG program at one time in probably 20 years.  That's just the first step, of course, but it is a first step.  I'm looking forward to tracking this into the next couple years.

The non-conference schedule is very soft which you would hope would allow the Falcons to stack up some Ws.  What I like to watch for is the young team improving through the conference season, and that's what I hope for this year.  Anything on the plus side of .500 is a step forward for the program.