The unofficial online home for fans of the Kent State University Golden Flashes. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

Kent State plays host to the Huskies from the northern half of Illinois on Tuesday at the MAC Center. The Flashes and the Huskies have identical 1-1 conference records & identical 9-6 overall records as well. NIU is coming off a nice home win over Central Michigan. In that win 4 Huskies scored 16 points or more and the team grabbed 53 total rebounds. Impressive.

The leading scorer for Northern is Marin Maric. The 6'11 250 pound senior is scoring 13 points per game on 53% shooting. Maric also leads the team in rebounding. Next is 6'5 senior Aaric Armstead who is averaging about 10 points per night. A trio of Huskies are scoring about 8 points per game including; 6'2 sophomore Laytwan Porter, 6'2 senior Dontel Highsmith and 6'8 Jaylen Key.

This is an important one for the Golden Flashes. Despite the poor overall performance there is no shame in losing a MAC contest on the road against a veteran Ohio U team. But bouncing back and beating a middle of the road opponent from the west at home is a big deal. Remember the recipe to winning the MAC, or at least being in play for a bye, is taking care of business at home and stealing one or two big ones on the road.

I'll take KSU in this one:

Flashes 81
Huskies 72
And all is right with the world.

New to the KSU live feed as I couldn't make it to the game...is there usually no sound?

(01-10-2017 07:06 PM)jbails0881 Wrote:  New to the KSU live feed as I couldn't make it to the game...is there usually no sound?

Welcome to our world. But help is coming (in 2017?). We may catch-up with the rest of MAC and get ESPN3.

Only three of tonight's games are on ESPN3 for whatever reason. Buffalo and BG also are not on.

Did I read it right. Hall didn't start?

Laughable, mediocre, lack of leadership. A home loss to northern illinois. Yikes.

Can basketball be any uglier?

I'm afraid my fear is being realized: KSU basketball is on the cusp of becoming irrelevant, just like the football program. The majority of the other MAC programs are passing us by. It can be reversed, but there is a lot of work ahead.

(01-10-2017 08:09 PM)fallsdog Wrote:  Did I read it right. Hall didn't start?

No he did not. Coach must have been a little upset with his attitude after the Ohio game. He was out there within 3 minutes however.

Why did they not use the 1-3-1 zone very much in the second half? NIU could do nothing against it in the first half. Couldn't understand why they changed. Hall could do nothing against their big man and after an excellent first half Walker was shutdown and was quite frustrated by the end of the game. I am afraid this team has some big time issues. We need to turn it around quickly or we are headed for our worst season in quite awhile.

This game pretty much puts me in "hope we can get hot come tourney time" mode. I think we're in for a lot more conference L's this year. I'm pretty disappointing with a lot of things right now, but let me point out a few things I put on the coaches.

1. We didn't build the roster to take advantage of Hall's ability on offense or cover up for his shortcomings defensively.

2. Our rotations don't make sense. At the beginning we looked pretty good. De La Rosa played and Hall sat for the first 3:42 and we were +5. Then we brought Hall in and took De La Rosa out for the next 2:26 and we were +5 over that time. So we were +10 six minutes in and looked poised to run away with it. Then we brought De La Rosa back in with Hall and they immediately started double and triple teaming Hall every time he touched it. The ball seems to move a lot slower when those two are in together and that allows them to double Hall easier. I'll get back to this later...

3. I don't know what went on in the halftime locker room, or in the timeouts tonight... but the results weren't great. We came out from halftime completely flat (which has happened a lot this year). We had the ball in a tied game with the shot clock off and going into a timeout at the end of regulation, so I assume we drew up a play? But the result was basically hold for the last shot, (which I agree with) then hand it to Walker and let him force it one-on-one which most would argue didn't resemble an actual play. So what what actually drawn up? Then we had the ball with 1:26 to go down 1 and we got a free timeout from Hall fouling out... what did we get coming out of that timeout? Our 7 foot center getting called for a 5 second violation holding the ball at the elbow while there was no apparent movement away from the ball to help him. Seriously? Without knowing what's going on in the huddle I can't say if it's bad play calling or bad execution, but it certainly doesn't look good. Well coached teams get good looks out of timeouts.

Finally, I know I've harped on the Hall + De La Rosa = bad things over the last few days. Here's some stats to support this theory.

In the three MAC games (so games against teams that know how Hall's game) this is the amount of time they spent on the court together and the +/-.
- NIU: Played 11:55 together. Team was -3 during this time. In the other 33:05 the team was -1.
- OU: Played 12:21 together. Team was -14 during this time. In the other 27:39 the twas was -4.
- BSU: Played 17:32 together. Team was -7 during this time. In the other 22:28 the team was +17.
So through 3 MAC games we're -24 when they're on the court together and +12 when at least one of them isn't in. So we're 36 points worse in their roughly 42 minutes together than the other 83 minutes...holy s#!t.

To be fair, we played offense/defense with De La Rosa at the end of the Ball State game, so that became a little inflated by him only being on the court for defensive possessions. This was responsible for -4 of that -7. But also to be fair, that means BSU was scoring on those defensive possessions.

Look, I don't dislike De La Rosa. In fact, I think he's our second best post player. But it's not always about putting the best players on the court together. It's about putting the best lineup on the court. I know we can't cut their overlap entirely, but if we limit it as much as possible I think we'll get better results and even when there is overlap it might work better because it will be harder for teams to focus on it when game planning.

Ok, I'll end with one positive. Edwin single handedly broke up a 4-on-1 fast break in the first half and it was a thing of beauty. He started by setting up to draw a charge on the first guy, but when the he dished it, Edwin quickly reacted to challenge the next guys shot which forced him to dish it to their big running down the middle of the lane. As Edwin landed from challenging the shot he reached in and smacked the ball out of the bigs hands as he gathered for a dunk, it went off that guy's leg and out of bounds. Heck of a hustle play. He works as hard on defense as anyone we've had in recent memory.

(01-10-2017 09:48 PM)flash77 Wrote:  I'm afraid my fear is being realized: KSU basketball is on the cusp of becoming irrelevant, just like the football program. The majority of the other MAC programs are passing us by. It can be reversed, but there is a lot of work ahead.

"Tradition never graduates...It eventually just flunks out due to extremely mediocre recruiting and coaching."

This team is either one of the least intelligent in America, one of the worst coached or both:

- As referenced with ball tied in regulation NIU came out in a 1-3-1 zone and we acted like we had never seen one in our lives. That's either poor coaching in kids don't know what to do or just stupidity that we cant recognize it and run zone offense.
- 5 second calls
- we had 17 shots in 2nd half because we couldn't stop turning it over.
- I get the feeling the guys have no idea what their roles are as there is NO lineup continuity. I'd still love to know what mitch Peterson did to get 1-2 minutes a game. in those minutes he had a block and immediately pulled.

This was a huge swing game in our season and I'm fearful we may be heading down the rat hole.