Championship Game of The 100 Club Classic tonight. A chance for our young team to win a tournament. I took a look at the boxscores from last night, and made some comparisons for us to look at as the game approaches.

Main Starting Lineup (last night):
PG: McLemore (6'3" 185) Freshman who led Maine in scoring last night. 6-9 from three point land..has to be a big time shooter.
SG: Socoby (6'6" 190) Junior who was the second leading scorer last night. Based on his 4 assists and 6 turnovers, assuming he is the playmaker.
SF: Bernal (6'5" 200) Junior, 12 pts 5 assists 7 rebounds. Could be a tough matchup in our 3 guard lineup, will be interesting to see how Ingle matches up with this.
PF: Barnies (6'7 205) Sophomore only played 18 minutes...big men look they rotate in and out. His stats don't show much from last night.
C: McNally (6'7" 250) From his build is a bruiser. 2 rbs and 4 fouls in 23 minutes, but I have a feeling we are going to need to keep him off the boards

C: Chetinov (6'9" 250) Freshman who had 9 pts 7 rebounds off the bench. I think we will see a lot of him tonight. Big body who also hit 3-3 from the foul line. Could start
G: Owes (6'3" 195) Senior, transfer from St. Peters College...I think KSU actually has played against this guy in a tournament a few years back. I know that KSU played against St. Peters. Probably just a solid combo guard off the bench.

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It looks like this team depends on its three guards to do a bulk of the scoring. We need to be careful for the freshman big man, and their bruiser. Defensive intensity on the perimeter is going to be key, and we will need to rebound well at all positions, as we will be smaller at almost every position.

Looking forward to watching the game again tonight on ASun.tv. If you live in the area, get out, get a friend, and go to the game.

Go Owls!

yea good analysis KB. that's about it, although they have some big men, they'll try to beat you by shooting. That's something i saw last night. also, you nailed it about socoby. although he didn't do much last night, he's their go to man. he was named all-conference america east last season.

Pretty good guesswork based on the box score :) You think we have a shot at winning tonight? My guess is that it will be a tough battle...much more difficult than last night.

yea i believe we have a chance. i think the black bears will come out firing though. i think their performance last night was an anomaly. should be a good battle, but if we can play consistently we should come out 2-0. and theoretically, not to look ahead, but could start the season 3-0 with clark-atlanta on tuesday.

Woah there big fella :) Lets just get tonight's game in hand.

I did see one article that said we have a chance to be 6-1 before we play a conference game

They played zone for the entire game vs N. Ill. So if we are hitting three point shots watch out.

Zone can make a young team stagnant...we need to make sure that we continue to get the ball in the paint if they are playing zone. The worst thing you can do against a zone is just settle for 3pt shots all night long.

if they do play a zone it will depend on what zone it is. if its a 3-2 zone, then most definitely we will try to get it down low to Allison or whoever is done there. if its a 2-3 then we might be more inclined to take an outside jumper. regardless of zone though, the way you are taught growing up (played rec ball for a long time) is you beat the zone by passing. if that's the case, then i suppose by looking at the owls' passing tonight we can get a good gauge of how we're doing against the zone. on a completely unrelated--eh sort of related--topic, i'd like to see the owls run the court. thats another way to beat the zone, if you're able to get out there and run the court, then the zone is obsolete because they can't get it set up very well.

Anyone else lose the feed with 2 minutes to go?

me too -asuntv killing me

KennesawBasketball Wrote:Zone can make a young team stagnant...we need to make sure that we continue to get the ball in the paint if they are playing zone. The worst thing you can do against a zone is just settle for 3pt shots all night long.

wow tough game for the owls. KB you nailed that one. i think it was the perfect D for the owls offense. it was so lethargic and they didnt run the floor like i mentioned earlier. and the shots they did take they didnt make many of them. tough game. and being at the game it felt like we were down 30 like the entire game.

Final 60 -47 Maine

we were down 5 at the half, and just dropped our pants in the 2nd. it was a frustrating game.

I thought it might be a tough game for us. We are young, but I am so glad that we had this experience early on in the year. It will pay huge dividends later in the year when we face zones in conference. Wish we could have played a bit better, but we were stilll in the game late even after playing pretty poor. Defense wasn't all that bad for most of the game even though I am sure that the stats won't be that pretty.

Tough loss, but we came away from the tournament 1-1 with some good experience. We need to come out strong against Clark Atlanta, and get back above .500...

On a brighter note the crowd looked good on ASun.tv this time...must have been at least 1500 there....Anyone know the official number?

no official number yet, but it was definitely a good crowd. there were a lot of students there. i hope that many of them will come back. the numbers will probably be a bit jaded because it was the homecoming game, and a lot of the greek members were out. although for a good sized crowd maine did a good job in keeping them out of it for the majority of the contest. so there is one thing i despise about atlanta sports fans that i see evidence of at ksu. atlanta fans only come out to big games, and when they do jump on the bandwagon they're always there late! ksu has some late arriving fans, and its just disappointing to see, we're 5 years removed from a national championship. but i guess that doesnt mean anything now because of us here now were around back then. it sucks, but it is what it is. i can hear the voice on field of dreams saying "if you win, they will come" haha

why do we always lose when the students come out! We lose, and then they just don't come back. Striped Crew really needs to get a ton of ppl at the game...maybe bring a ton of frat members to get the place loud and make it fun.

official attendance per the box score was 1,143. the attendance for friday's game was 1,012. there seemed to be more of a difference in the two nights than only 133 people. who knows though.

Well I intentionally reserved my judgement until after the tournament was over but it was tough!

Overall, I can't say that I was satisfied, but what true fan ever is with their team? The 2 realities that came out of the weekend for me was the realization that we can't rely on the 3 point shot even though we have good 3 point shooters and shoot a blistering percent to get your first victory. The other realization what that it was really obvious that we were not as prepared as we could have been for the Maine zone. This comes from an inside source. Watching film at 1pm on the day of the game just doesn't cut it and is not enough when you have a young team that needs floor time in preparation for a situation like that.

We need to learn and move on quickly, because Tuesday is the day after tomorrow already and we will be here before we know it. After the game I heard a conversation with an assistant coach from Clark Atlanta as he was walking to his car and talking on his cell phone to one of his players (or maybe an assistant coach), basically saying that they had more talent than us and they could beat us. But what was he supposed to say after seeing a loss like that?

As someone above said, this loss certainly will get us ready for the conference. That Maine team was a typical Northeastern team in the Syracuse zone defensive philosophy mode, without Syracuse level talent. They did what they did well and we got taught a lesson.

I saw an interesting sign in our student section that said "Kurtis Woods for President." Not just yet. He is certainly someone who brings excitement in the Ronnell Wooten mode. One of the kids from Northern Illinois was asking him if he was just a freshman ... they couldn't believe it. And I could see why they would ask that question. Woods brings athleticism and a nice game, but he still needs some work defensively. He also needs to learn to vary his game a little more when his three is not falling. At halftime, he was 0-5 and we went to the locker room down by 5.

As a young team, we need to pick our spots to be more aggressive. Allison, Whipple and Nickerson disappeared for long stretches even while getting touches in the offense. At least Pollock tried to play defense, but he fouled out. Who else was that aggressive? I think we will be fine on Tuesday, but on Friday, we will be tested again under even more severe circumstances. Of the next three games we need to win two and that counts Clark. After this initial, exciting opening weekend we need to keep making progress.

Go, Fly, Win, Owls! Wrote:Well I intentionally reserved my judgement until after the tournament was over but it was tough!

Overall, I can't say that I was satisfied, but what true fan ever is with their team? The 2 realities that came out of the weekend for me was the realization that we can't rely on the 3 point shot even though we have good 3 point shooters and shoot a blistering percent to get your first victory. The other realization what that it was really obvious that we were not as prepared as we could have been for the Maine zone. This comes from an inside source. Watching film at 1pm on the day of the game just doesn't cut it and is not enough when you have a young team that needs floor time in preparation for a situation like that.

We need to learn and move on quickly, because Tuesday is the day after tomorrow already and we will be here before we know it. After the game I heard a conversation with an assistant coach from Clark Atlanta as he was walking to his car and talking on his cell phone to one of his players (or maybe an assistant coach), basically saying that they had more talent than us and they could beat us. But what was he supposed to say after seeing a loss like that?

As someone above said, this loss certainly will get us ready for the conference. That Maine team was a typical Northeastern team in the Syracuse zone defensive philosophy mode, without Syracuse level talent. They did what they did well and we got taught a lesson.

I saw an interesting sign in our student section that said "Kurtis Woods for President." Not just yet. He is certainly someone who brings excitement in the Ronnell Wooten mode. One of the kids from Northern Illinois was asking him if he was just a freshman ... they couldn't believe it. And I could see why they would ask that question. Woods brings athleticism and a nice game, but he still needs some work defensively. He also needs to learn to vary his game a little more when his three is not falling. At halftime, he was 0-5 and we went to the locker room down by 5.

As a young team, we need to pick our spots to be more aggressive. Allison, Whipple and Nickerson disappeared for long stretches even while getting touches in the offense. At least Pollock tried to play defense, but he fouled out. Who else was that aggressive? I think we will be fine on Tuesday, but on Friday, we will be tested again under even more severe circumstances. Of the next three games we need to win two and that counts Clark. After this initial, exciting opening weekend we need to keep making progress.

GFWO: The reason for that is pretty simple. We had all the time we needed to prepare for Western Illinois, and as you said we had 1 day to prepare for Maine. I don't know if there is anything our coaches could have done about that. As a fan I certainly wouldn't want them spending time preparing for a possible opponent, when we have the real opponent coming up the next night. Since we didn't know who we would play, preparing the team in such a short time would be tough.

Clark Atlanta is not going to be an easy game, as we are still short on our rotation without Mitchell and Cummings. It seems as though they won't be coming back for a bit, so we have to prepare to play with what we have. I have been impressed with Zadrian off the bench, so it wouldn't surprise me to see him get a few more minutes against Clark Atlanta. Other than that I would say that starting out 1-1 and finishing 2nd in the tournament (out of 4 teams) is still pretty good. I am looking forward to our next game to see if we have made any improvements.