The End of the Road: The Hartford Preview

The end of this season is a little bit anti-climactic. Today's game against Hartford at The Greek could not mean less. The 3 seed is locked up. Hartford is so bad that they are guaranteed to be a non-factor in the tournament. We beat them by like 30 last time.

The only thing that means anything today is that it's Senior Day. Today we say goodbye to 3 guys who will (hopefully) graduate and who will not put on the red and white beyond next weekend (plus whatever happens with post-season for us, if anything).

Sam Tully - I can honestly say I have never seen the kid play. He hasn't gotten into a game this year, but had a rebound last year as well as a steal. But today, he will get into today's game and make his family proud. Let's see if he can but the biscuit in the basket.

Marques Johnson - I like MJ. He's a good backup PG and pretty much does his part when he's asked to. He was never a scorer but always had a good A/TO ratio when he was in. I remember hearing rumors about him possibly wanting to transfer a couple years ago, and I'm glad he didn't. I'll have two great memories about MJ. One was the career game he had this year when he stepped in for the suspended Corey Lowe against Albany - he played all 40 minutes and came away with 7 points, 7 assists and 8 rebounds... and 0 turnovers. The other memory I'll have is when we went to to Holiday Classic at Madison Square Garden. We were taking the PATH train back to Hoboken after a tough OT loss to St. John's, and one of the train operators noticed our BU shirts. He told he us he had a nephew on the team - it was MJ's uncle. He told us how proud he was to have him playing ball up in Boston, and we told he we loved MJ.

Matt Wolff - Matt is probably the most controversial player we've had in our program. As the coach's son, he gets a lot of scrutiny. And since he doesn't score much, he catches a lot of flack for all the minutes he plays. After a very promising freshman year (ALLLL the way back in 2004-05), he had really bad luck with knee injuries. But since then, he has played in 60 straight games and has quietly been a solid player, whether anyone wants to admit it. For all the shit he has taken, I don't believe would have been as successful this year had Matt not been on the team.

Thanks for the memories, guys.

Debut of the New Look Terriers: The Albany Preview

I was planning to do a recap review of the entire out-of-conference season, but any games played before today hardly even seem relevant anymore.

I know that the BU Athletic Dept still hasn't confirmed any injuries, or the fact that Corey won't play tonight, but I'm taking the Hot Dog at his word. The kid once transported a t-shirt 350 miles for me, for crying out loud. So assuming he's right, how do the events of *Black Thursday* change this team?

Short answer is: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck... A slightly longer answer is: it will change the team a lot.

BU's bread-and-butter (when we were still making bread and butter at the beginning of the season) was always the perimeter game. Big time 3-point shooters. That's what opposing defenses focused on. Now, Corey Lowe is our only 3-point shooting guard. Yes, JH23 and JOB can go long-range, but they're are forwards, so they have other responsibilities too (ahem, rebounding, ahem...). And Corey isn't even playing tonight!!

Marques Johnson will be running the point from now on. Marques cannot shoot 3's with any regularity. Who else is there tonight? Sherrod Smith, Tunde, Sam Tully and Michael Schulze have a combined 2 career 3-pointers, both by Sherrod (who sports a .111 3FG%). Brendan Sullivan, not a guard but another walkon, at least has 5 in his career, albeit all during one magical night at Rider. Bottom line: We are not getting production from the 1 or the 2 positions tonight, unless one of the traditional starters (Holland or Matt Wolff) shifts over.

Probable starters, I'm guessing:
G Johnson
F Wolff
F Holland
F O'Brien
F Brittain (maybe Pelage?)

That's a big lineup - 4 forwards, 1 guard. This completely changes the offense into a post-oriented one. The emergence of JOB and Jeff Pelage, along with the leftover talent that we know Scott Brittain has (need ya know, buddy), makes that the strength of this team. Do we even have plays designed to get the ball into the post?!?!

For those wanting to see D'Wolff gone from the sideline, you'll get to see what kind of coaching mind he has tonight... for better or worse.


The High Roller is stuck at work and cannot blog, but weighed in on today's occurrences via text message. A few choice nuggets of wisdom:

• First off, im excited 2 c the rod get some decent time. I always like seeing him play
• I cant think of ne more positives. Thir is a horrible situation all around
• I still dont get why hes benching corey. If hes trying to make a point its not working
• Also I think marquez wil5 be a disaster

So there you have it. The High Roller has a knack for seeing the big picture, spelling errors or not.

And you know what? I'm so burnt out by all this stuff that I can't even thing about our opponent tonight, Albany. So no scouting report or anything. Just know that they lost their 3 or 4 best players from last year when we KNOCKED THEM OFF IN OVERTIME IN THE TOURNAMENT and so they've got a lot of new contributors. None of which I know much or anything about. Read what this guy has to say.

Anyway, it's still my job to root for the Terriers, so GO BU, and.... this should be interesting.

"No, the season didn't die... it just went to go live with a nice farm family"

Thanks to a scoop from the Hot Dog, we now know that:

A) I was wrong about Corey - he's BENCHED for the Albany game
B) Tyler Morris is OUT FOR THE YEAR with a torn ACL.
C) Carlos Strong is OUT FOR THE YEAR with a torn meniscus.

Fuck.

First, I feel for the guys who got hurt, especially Tyler. Ever since he got to BU, the kid can't stay healthy long enough to tie his shoelaces. He was the heart and soul of the team during his Rookie of the Year season, and it killed him last year when he wasn't able to contribute -- this is going to be even worse on him.

This team was going to have a hard enough road getting back to its old form... now it has to try it without two of our best players. For a season that started with so much promise and potential... this is a real shame.

Neither Carlos nor Tyler had been playing up to his potential yet this year - but they are important players that contribute a lot to this team. Suddenly, our backcourt -- which was the supposed strength of the Terriers -- is now missing two of its best shooters.

Marques Johnson will now play the point position for about 38 minutes per game. Before this happened, I was going to suggest getting Marques more minutes on the floor as a way to help the offense flow a little better - now we'll be getting it whether we like it or not.

But suppose Marques or Corey needs a break, or gets into foul trouble, or God-forbid gets injured... who comes into the game? Of the remaining guards on the roster, Sherrod Smith leads in minutes played with... 2. Total. For the season. And even he's more of a wing player. Could this be the emergence of the mythical, rarely-seen but never-verified Sam Tully, or --dare I say it-- Tunde??

Oh man, we're in trouble...

The Better Belding

When it comes to the America East conference schedule, which came out yesterday, I think of it like Mr. Belding. Do you remember when he wanted to take the gang on their Senior Class Trip to Yosemite for a lovely, but slightly boring and predictable, nature outing? But then his brother the substitute teacher, Rod Belding, swooped in with the more exciting prospect of whitewater rafting, leaving Mr. Belding to sadly toss his Yosemite brochures in the trash.

Every year, the non-conference schedule swoops in, tempting us with fun exciting games like Notre Dame and UMass and GW. But where's that non-conference schedule gonna be when the end of the year comes and BU wants to try to make the Big Dance? That's right: taking off with some stewardess who's only in town for the weekend.

And that's when we'll realize who's been there with us the whole time - the predictable and slightly boring games with Maine, Binghamton and Stony Brook. The long, flowing golden locks of GW and the chiseled jaw of Marshall are not taking us whitewater rafting to the postseason... it's going to be the balding, paunchy Hartford's and Albany's.

To paraphrase, it may not be the most exciting schedule, but yesterday we got the better schedule.

Thu 1/8 - @ Albany
Sun 1/11 - vs. New Hampshire
Wed 1/14 - vs. Vermont
Sat 1/17 - @ Binghamton
Mon 1/19 - vs. Stony Brook
Thu 1/22 - vs. UMBC
Sun 1/25 - @ Maine
Sat 1/31 - @ Hartford
Mon 2/2 - @ UMBC
Thu 2/5 - vs. Albany
Sat 2/7 - @ New Hampshire
Wed 2/11 - @ Vermont
Sat 2/14 - vs. Binghamton
Wed 2/18 - @ Stony Brook
Sat 2/21 - vs. Bracketbuster TBA
Thu 2/26 - vs. Maine
Sun 3/1 - vs. Hartford

We found out which AE games are going to be held in The Greek too: Vermont on 1/14, Albany on 2/5, and Hartford on 3/1 (along with GW, Marshall, Holy Cross and the Bracketbuster). Vermont and Albany are no-brainers, as the dominant forces in the conference over the past few years. To me, Hartford is a mild upset - I thought they would give UMBC some respect for winning it all last year. But it'll be cool because the Hartford game is Senior Night - hopefully a starting lineup consisting of Matt Wolff, Marques Johnson and someone named Sam Tully can fill the Arena.