Saturday's opponent NJIT got ready for the Dragons tonight defeating familiar DIII foe Keane College 116-63. NJIT will come in at 2-2 with wins against Keane and Lafayette. Their losses were to Seton Hall and Bashir Mason's Wagner squad.
They scored 96 and 116 in the wins and 49 and 53 in the losses.
They have a well-balanced team in terms of scoring.
I dont think any game will be easy for us this season, but this is a winnable game and would be nice to grab a road win. Winning on the road is tough so it will be interesting to see how this team responds to that. It will be a higher scoring affair, but likely in between what NJIT has had so far
Drexel's last road win was about 325 days ago when they beat the Q 91-74 on 12/21/16. I remember after that game when they were 6-6 that I thought that they were going to be decent last year. That games was followed by their 3-17 free fall. Hoping that they can pull out a road win on Saturday. This is one of the first games to be played at NJIT's new arena, and the game will be televised on ESPN3.
NJIT is 296th in the RPI, and they were 293rd last season. They're 310th in the Sagarin. They haven't beaten a team in the top half of the RPI (as of the end of the season for past seasons) since they beat Texas-Arlington in the CIT Quarterfinals on March 24, 2016. They play in the Atlantic Sun, which has half its teams with no Division I wins. There are 32 conferences, and the Atlantic Sun ranks 28th so far in the Conference RPI and had an average rank of 27th for the last five complete seasons.
Game notes for tomorrow,
http://drexeldragons.com/documents/2017/...f?id=8151, show Tramaine Isabell as a probable starter. While I suppose maybe Isabell has played his way into the starting role, I fear it might mean that Harper is hurt. If that is the case and if Overton is still out,we are starting to get quite thin at the guard position. It would be nice if we could just recall Kari from Iceland about now. Seeing how that's not going to happen if Harper and Overton are indeed out, I imagine Sam Green fills the sub minutes at guard especially with Demir eligible now.
Isabell is averaging at least 9 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 three-pointers made per game. He's one of five players doing that so far this season, but it's hard to do for a whole season. The only player to do that with at least 20 games since 1992-1993 was Mike Smith of Louisiana-Monroe in in 1999-2000.
From what we’ve seen so far, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t win this relatively easy if everyone is available. Even if we’re missing Troy and Miles, as long as the rest stay out of foul trouble, think we should be relatively okay. Just hope we start off well for a change.
Troy, Tyshawn and Miles all out today. Troy hoping to be back by CAA play after suffering separated shoulder against Drake.
(11-25-2017 03:44 PM)DrachenFire Wrote: [ -> ]Troy, Tyshawn and Miles all out today. Troy hoping to be back by CAA play after suffering separated shoulder against Drake.
And the curse of the Drexel Transfer continues.
At the under 8 timeout in the first half, terrible free throw shooting, lots of open looks behind the 3 point line missed. Drexel seems to be outplaying NJIT everywhere except on the scoreboard.
Tyshawn Miles is in the game today. Sam Green looks to be hurt after going after that bad imbounds pass in which he appeared to be pushed out of bounds into the Drexel bench.
Drexel up 34-31 at halftime, but as I said earlier, they seemed to outplay NJIT everywhere but the scoreboard. Drexel had the 13-4 foul advantage in the first half, but only shot 6 for 16 from the FT line, so they had the opportunity to have a much larger lead. Just using the eye test, Drexel seems to be the quicker, stronger team, and even though they’ve only turned the ball over 6 times thus far, they seem to be playing sloppy to allow NJIT to keep the game close. Hopefully they can fix some things up and take charge in the 2nd half.
34-31 lead at the half is nice. Brutal FT shooting. 6-16 from the stripe. We are attacking and getting to the line and punishing ourselves. Lots of missed open shots. Despite this we have the lead. That is encouraging for the second half.
Horrible 3rd quarter of the game, scoring just 6 points. A 3 point halftime lead had fallen to a 10 point deficit with 9:50 to go. This is a bad basketball team.
That was ugly losing 65-53. If we made the 13 freethrows we missed, I suppose we could have won. But it just seemed like there was a lack of desire out there today.
Before we complain too much about being shorthanded due to injury, Alabama played the last 10+ minutes with 3 players. There were down by 11 when the fourth guy got injured and they end up losing by 5. That is playing with some guts there.
I had left to go eat dinner with the family and it was 43-40 NJIT. Based on the final score I am not sure I even wanted to know what had happened the rest of the second half. It must have been brutal for us to have scored 19 total points. Up to when I left (very early in the second half) shots were definitely open, which makes scoring so little that much more painful to see. Forget about the game and move on.
Put up a post on the game
here.
I think it captured Coach Spiker's thoughts, and my own, as best as possible. You'll note that injuries didn't even make the body of the piece. This loss was less about being short handed and more about being short willed.
They didn't represent themselves, and they sure didn't represent all of you.
Scary time to be a supporter. There's some long term thoughts that will come out of this, but that may take a few weeks for us to get a story up on. Coach Spiker is walking a tightrope here that he has to get right, and being shorthanded with the injuries is going to make that even harder. I think this team has talent and if they ban together they can do some things that will surprise people. But when they don't, games like NJIT will happen. That second half was embarrassing for the coaches, players, and supporters.
That wouldn't happen to have anything to do with this team's 342/351 ranking in terms of assist percentage, at least on offense, would it? Team can't shoot, the players know it and are therefore taking it upon themselves to score instead of looking for a teammate. Haven't watched any games since the opener, but early on, we're really missing the outside threat that Kari provided while still heavily shooting the three; our starting 1 is playing more minutes, taking relatively the same percentage of shots, but his efficiency has plummeted early on while his assist rate has gone down and his turnover rate has increased; arguably our best shooter to start the year (Doles) has been limited due to foul trouble (take out the Drake game where he had only 2 in 43 minutes, and he's averaging 9.3 fouls per 40 minutes). Injuries are only going to make things worse, hope things can be held together.