A Boost for Our Bench Scoring: The Maine Preview

I am currently watching Georgetown-Notre Dame on CBS, and they flashed a stat onscreen that caught my eye. It said that Georgetown is ranked #345 out of 347 D-I schools in bench scoring with 17 points per game, and Notre Dame is last in the nation at #347 out of 347 with 13.6 bench points per game.

I immediately called bullshit. As a Terrier fan, I know that absolutely NOBODY has worse bench production than us.

Basketball State doesn't show bench scoring, so I had to add this up myself. All told, even including 5 or 6 games at the beginning when John Holland was coming off the bench, BU non-starters only scored 290 points in 28 games - an average of 10.3 points per game. So SUCK IT CBS, I had no idea where you got that stat from. I'd love to know what they were talking about.

Things could change today, as it's Senior Day and all our senior bench guys will start, meaning we will have Jake O'Brien and John Holland coming off the bench. Here's how I see our starting lineup:

G Mike Schulze
G Tunde Agboola
F Sherrod Smith
F Valdas Sirutis
F Brendan Sullivan

Anything else would be a travesty. Lowe, Strong and Morris don't need to start this game. All 5 of those bench guys should get at least 4 minutes, since this game is essentially meaningless. It would be really awesome if Scott Brittain could suit up for this one too, but I don't see it happening.

So let's have these guys go out and win this Senior Day for Scott.

FML: The UNH Preview

Tyler Morris broke his hand Tuesday in practice, Scott Brittain is basically out for the entire year, and BJ Bailey just transferred out.

Who is going to play for us!??!

Now, Corey Lowe is our ONLY ballhandler! What happens when Corey is in foul trouble or needs a breather? Nevermind that Corey is most effective off the ball - nobody else can bring it up. Is Mike Schultz going to get significant minutes? Will Carlos and John Holland bring up the ball? Tunde???

I'm not even sure we'll be able to finish .500 now. UNH tonight on the road will be a good barometer. They are not a bad team, but not top tier. Our core of Holland, Lowe and O'Brien is still better than any other in the league, but ZERO bench is ridiculous.

Poor Tyler Morris. This is the 4th major injury of his BU career. I'm sure he feels like shit right now, just wanting to play, and I feel bad for him. Here's hoping he can come back in a month (or less!) and contribute mightily to the stretch run and the tournament. And hoping we can stay afloat in the meantime.

There Will Be Blood: The UConn Preview

In between last week's Northeastern game and today's UConn game was a game against Harvard that occurred precisely in the middle my holiday travel, hence the lack of preview/wrap-up. Yes, as a devoted fan of BU hoops I demanded of a very understanding girlfriend that we pull the car off the highway and find a bar with free WiFi, but the game was also precisely in the middle of my other favorite team, the Tennessee Titans, producing one of the more improbable comebacks in NFL history.

So, in the middle of The Office Beer Bar & Grill in Morristown, NJ, I had one eye (but no ears) on the Terriers's game against the Smarties. First the Titans were up and the Terriers were down big in the first half. Then the Titans gave up the lead but BU streaked to a double-digit lead in the second half. Finally, as the Titans made history BU ran out of gas and left Case Gym with an uninspiring 78-70 loss to an admittedly decent Harvard Crimson squadron.

It's harder than you think to watch your two favorite teams at once, but I did pick up a few things about the Terriers game. One was that Corey had a rough game - not only did he go 0-7 but had bad turnovers on two consecutive possessions in the final minutes that led to fast break dunks and thwarted any possibly comeback. Real daggers in the heart.

Another thing that I noticed is we are really hurting for bodies. BJ and Valdas were not playing due to various ailments. Tunde even got into the game, and made a nice steal and basket before the end of the first half.

This is going to be the big story going into tonight's matchup against UConn. In addition to those two guys plus Scott Brittain, the Hot Dog says Corey will now be sidelined with an injury.

Are you kidding me??? We will barely have enough guys to field a starting five. Forget that this is on TV against the #13 team in the country... we couldn't beat Binghamton with this many injuries.

OK, that isn't true. But this will be a slaughter. I am afraid to admit that I am hosting a BU Alumni in DC Club game-watch at a bar tonight. There are casual BU alums who are almost never exposed to BU basketball and will be turned off from the team because of tonight! We lost to #21 Georgia Tech by 18... we'll be lucky to lose to UConn by twice that.

Back to .500 in America East!

There's nothing like inviting UNH to town, if you want to ditch that 5-game losing streak.

Thanks to the Mild Cats, BU is back on the right track after a 31-point thrashing in The Roof. We didn't seem to be suffering ill effects, at least for this game, from the absence of TyLos. And we got a glimpse of how Dennis plans to run the team for the rest of the year without them.

Sadly, the Rod will not be a large part of the plans. Neither will Tunde. However, the Rod got a good 4 minutes of burn against UNH -- 4th man off the bench!! He's been a player Wolff has thrown in to a game in years past when he gets REALLY pissed at guys 1-8 in the lineup, and I expect that to continue this year.

In other news, John Holland is a man. Probably my favorite thing in the world is watching him play tight D at the top of the zone, watching him tip a pass and chase it into the backcourt -- and for about 2.5 seconds being overcome by goosebumps knowing that John Holland is about to throw down a ferocious breakaway dunk. Nice feeling.

Johnny scored 25 in both games last week - the 25 in the loss to Albany was almost more impressive since he was missing Corey Lowe and was trying to carry the team across the finish line by himself. But both games served notice that JH23 is out of his slump and can go toe-to-toe with any player in America East. For his efforts, John was rewarded with his second America East Player of the Week, and I salute him.

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...