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I'm taking my dad to the game. I hope they play well since I've been talking this team up to him for about 2 weeks.

We are looking into a different facility that is not located in South Bend. We may have found a better deal.

Unless you're going into Michigan or Chicago you're only other reasonable option is St. Johns, which is better than South Bend due to there is no time change.

As someone who lived there for 24 years I let the first one slide but now I have to correct you. It's just St. John. It's only one town.

Don't look now but the golden Grizzlies are coming.  They are nipping on our heels after a win against wsu making our return game that more important.  The game will have even more weight, not because they beat us last time but because of standings. 

[tweet]560632399458234368[/tweet]

This is a bit off topic but newcomer of the year award should go to EVN

I think they got rid of newcomer and now give it out to Freshman of the Year. And if anyone is going to win that it's Paris Bass. I'll give you a moment to look at what he's done this season while collecting 4 FotW awards.

Agreed, Bass has been very good this season. I can't remember, is there an All Freshmen team? Or All Newcomer team? Or none at all?

It's all freshman.

Right now I would pick
FOY- Bass, Paris   UDM (Leads HL Fr in PPG, RPG and efficency, 2nd in APG, SPG, BPG and MPG)
1st Team - Walker, Tevonn   VALP (1st in MPG, APG, and SPG, 2nd in Efficency, and PPG)
1st Team - Skara, David   VALP
1st Team - Hayes, Jalen   OAK
1st Team - Odiase, Tai   UIC

*calls on Grizz to tell me why I'm wrong not to pick Nick Daniels and how Tevonn is a bum*

Slocum's impending departure has been mentioned a number of times (not sure by how many different people) this season.

Any reason to think they're eager to get rid of him?

YSU's only had like nine seasons, out of 34 now in D1, with winning conference records.  Across the OVC, MidCon, and Horizon League.

Slocum's done better in the Horizon League than the last guy.  Even taking YSU to the "postseason"... for the first time since their NAIA days in the 40's and 50's?

Slocum's won a zillion games in his career, and surely is on that graphic they always used to show for Homer, and even seem to show for Coach K, etc.  Not sure why they calculate it this way, but they always seem to show "total career wins for active coaches currently coaching in D1, and we'll throw in any non-D1 wins they have too".  And Slocum's top 10, like Homer used to be.  And has passed Homer by now.  What's he now, 8th on the list?  Behind Rick Pitino, and maybe just got passed by Byrd at Belmont.  More wins than Homer Drew, more wins than Gene Bartow.  More wins than John Wooden!  Sure, it's a longevity award in part.  But, still.

I don't know the circumstances of the last YSU coach's, John Robic's, departure - but he seems to have landed more or less OK.  Assistant at Memphis and now at Kentucky.

Any reason to think that YSU's eager to get rid of Slocum?  That they're all of a sudden eager for a higher level of basketball achievement than they've managed... in the last 30 years?

I was going to say he might retire, but he's only 63. I would have pegged him for high 60s-low 70s. He looks 100. Maybe Tressel wants to improve the money sports, I mean they did just get rid of the FB coach, but he was sub par for YSU standards in football (Imagine, a winning record is still sub par, how much would we kill for a winning record in FB?)

13-3. I'm thinking we lose at CSU and I'm hoping that doesn't affect us negatively. C'mon 3 way tie between us, GB and CSU! If GB loses to us and @CSU and CSU loses @GB and we lose @CSU then we'll all be 1-1 against each other and I have no idea what the next tie breaker is after record vs. each other. CHAOS!

Guys, my bad.  It was 51 deg in Des Moines yesterday, I did not know that there was a snowstorm in Valpo yesterday.

Please accept my apologies.

Not a storm per say but there was an inch of snow on the car when I left the game and I had to brush it off when I left work at 5. Conditions were slick but not hazardous.

I can somewhat echo Valpo89's concerns with recruiting. I went to Lake Central and my junior year I was a regional qualifier in Cross Country and the 3200 in track, one of the top 10 distance runners in Lake county.  I received a letter of congratulations or interest from every D1 outside of Indiana, Purdue, Notre Dame, and Valpo. My grades were not nearly as good at 89's son's, but they were good enough to get into Valpo. I had 0 interest of running in college, 7 years of competing was enough and was already starting to feel the effects of running 350 days a year for 7 years. (Note: I now have the knees of a 65 year old according to a MRI tech when I went in 2 years ago to get them looked at since they were causing me so much pain I couldn't sit with them bent or stand for long periods of time.) I enjoyed my time at Valpo, and I might have considered running there if I had gotten a letter of interest from them, but since I didn't I decided to focus on going to basketball games instead.

When Oakland wins a road game against a team not named YSU or UIC we can acknowledge them.

What HL road game do we have that is impressive?  We can't hang our hats on almost beating Green Bay at their place. 

Wright State, we kind of took it to them in their own building. Also Oakland hasn't won a road game yet.

Really surprised at this one.  Other than the top four teams the HL seems to have a bunch of weak sisters who lack energy and intensity for the game. After the first five minutes it seemed like Milwaukee just folded their tent and went home.  Thought Jeter would get more out of his guys.

who are the top 4?

CSU, Green Bay, us and Oakland. With 2 losses at CSU and at Detroit (who always gets up for that rivalry) and wins vs the top 3, Oakland might be legit.

This is a bit off topic but newcomer of the year award should go to EVN

I think they got rid of newcomer and now give it out to Freshman of the Year. And if anyone is going to win that it's Paris Bass. I'll give you a moment to look at what he's done this season while collecting 4 FotW awards.

I'm really rooting for Oakland to go 8-8 this year, winning all their home games and losing all their road games. I'm not sure why but I think that would be the pinnacle of hilarity to me, especially since Kampe claims his tough OOC road schedule prepares the team for the HL schedule.

*cough*an update would be nice*cough*

Of the 29 Horizon League games, the home team has won 20 of them. The fact that we have 2 of the 9 league road wins is great. CSU has 3 of those wins and Green Bay has 2 of them. I'm not sure if that's a good sign that we have a strong upper tier or that we don't have a good spread of talent. Either way it's good that we have 22% of the road wins!

We should win this handily but if Vashil gets into early foul trouble then our old friend Matt Tiby will say "how do you do?" to an outmatched Jubril.

[a team]

It's very difficult to beat a team 3 times in a season.

You need to qualify this. Of the 9 teams in the HL there are only 3 to 4 that we wouldn't expect to beat 3 times in a season. In reality it isn't as hard to beat "a team" three times in a season.


During the last 4 seasons or so I would say we could beat 40% to 50% of the teams 3 times in a season and have many times.

Time to do some sluething. Because I'm good at that.

Since joining the Horizon League we've played what I'm going to call a triple a total of 14 times. Of those 14 triples, we won the first two meetings 9 times. Here's how we faired in the finale of those triples.

Mar 7, 2008- Wright State: After winning at Wright St. in early December to open HL season, we won an OT thriller at home in March to close the HL season. In the tourney we beat them a third time in the 2nd round. WSU was a respectable 12-6 and we were underdogs in the final game.
Mar 1, 2011- Youngstown St.: We beat them at home in January, on the road in February and at home again in March. None of the games were remarkably close and YSU had 2 conference wins that season.
Mar 4, 2011- Detroit: The games were decided by 10, 8, and 10. Young Ray Jr. wasn't quite the thorn in our side at this point.
Mar 3, 2012- Butler: You guys remember when we beat the back to back National Runners-up thrice in one season? Remember how the last games wasn't even close? Let's not talk about the game that took place three days after this.
Mar 6, 2012- Detroit: I guess we do have to talk about this. We beat them there, we beat them here and the less that's talked about this game, the better.
Mar 9, 2013- Green Bay: Seven days prior we went up to their house and beat them. After surviving a 1 point scare vs. UIC, Green Bay was at our house for this thriller, complete with "The Shot From Down Under".
Mar 12, 2013- Wright State: After winning by 6 at home in January and by 7 on the road in February, it would only make sense that we punched our NCAA ticket with an 8 point win in March.
Mar 4, 2014- UIC: Unfortunately for us Milwaukee ruined Flameout 2014. But we finished their dreadful season with a 10 point win in the ARC.
Mar 7, 2014-Milwaukee: We beat the eventual NCAA representatives twice, but we couldn't complete the triple with a victory. To say this game was disappointing is an understatement.

We've fallen victim to losing the triple twice since joining the HL
Mar 8, 2008- Cleveland St.: We lost to a pretty good Cleveland St. team that had a freshman by the name of Norris Cole.
Mar 3, 2009- Wright State: Oh yeah we don't talk about this season.

7-2 when trying to beat a team for the third time in a season. I could see us getting a 10th chance this season in our 15th overall triple.

The death march is dead. Long live the death march.

Anybody else notice that we've already won as many games as we did all last year (final 18-16) !!  Lots of work to do!!

gosh, i hope we don't lose 13 in a row

If we do, we know where to start the blame chain...

-Our super weak OOC schedule, next season we schedule 8 high major programs all with RPIs better than 25
-The refs for allowing the other team's PG to shoot 24 FTs in each of our remaining games
-The HL for letting the wrong Chicago team go
-The other team's coaches, because they're awful
-Tom Brady for deflating the balls
-The athletic department for not having a nice enough stadium
-THE FANS for not coming out to senior day despite the 10 game losing streak.
-The new Hockey team for distracting our players attention and recruiting Alec to come play for them.

Who was the wisconsin guy who would come on, and even was at the ARC a couple of times?  Was that UWM guy?

The one who said UIC to the MVC was a "done deal" per sources?

Jimmy aka PantherU

All trolling aside, choose 2 of these blind taste tested players and tell me who you're going to take. Real Poss is the percentage of possessions they are responsible for ending every game, be it a field goal attempt with no offensive rebound, an assist, or a turn over. The Real Shot is the percentage of shots they use every game. I took KenPom's Pos% and Shot% and multiplied it by their Min% to get the real percentages. In KenPom's he only uses the time they are on the court to determine the Pos% and Shot%. Note: For one of these players the Pos% and Real Poss as well as Shot% and Real Shot has less than 1% difference (It's Felder and it's because he's on the court for 99% of the game.) Don't know what a category means? Hover over it and you'll get a description.

Ortg	Real Poss	Real Shot	eFG%	TS%	OR%	DR%	AstRate	TORate	Blk%	Stl%	FC/40	FD/40	FTRate
127.6	18.64	22.7	59.4	63.0	7.7	18.3	7.6	10.5	0.9	1.4	2.7	4.2	26.8
111.5	25.63	26.9	51.8	56.9	2.0	12.6	25.6	16.3	0.2	3.0	2.4	5.5	43.6
110.0	19.15	19.1	51.9	55.1	8.4	17.8	17.0	13.4	1.6	0.8	3.5	4.6	40.6
99.7	29.38	24.2	44.4	53.5	2.7	11.3	38.7	24.9	0.6	3.4	2.8	6.0	55.2

He will get measured at the NBA pre draft camp. Would you like to make a wager. My meal to what you are willing to bet.  Maybe giving me fishing lessons or a ride on your 4 wheeler.

Aren't you from Detroit?

We can buy him one of those $1 houses. Man is he going to be pissed when we all eat Don Quiote on his tab. I could easily rack up $75 by myself there in wine, tapas and dessert.

They also weren't ready to represent the Horizon in the NIT 10 days later, where they lost to Belmont by 15.  Were Sykes and Brown still hurt 10 days later?

Sykes didn't play in that game, so yes. Brown played 28 minutes and had the worst game of that season, but was he hurt against Milwaukee? He played 35 minutes.

History tells me that this game will be decided by the refs...   Sorry but that is how I feel about some of the Horizon League road games.

They will call everything for the home team until the end and then try to make the calls look less one sided after they have impacted the game enough that it won't matter.

Did I wake up on the wrong side of the bed or what. ......

I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. I mean look at games we have at home. I don't think we get an inordinate calls in our favor and if anything I think we have terrible home court "advantage" when it comes to refs.  I don't trust the refs to call an even game, but to say that the calls will be slanted towards the home team might be wrong. I don't think you can predict which team will get the better end of the calls for the refs tonight.

There were only 8 players dressed for the game last night. The subs were two freshmen, one coming back from surgery, and a hobbled Karungi.

I'm not going to question whether a player is hurt or not but it does seem that every time I read stories about this team there are far more injuries than on the opposition team. Valpo seems to always play short-handed. This goes back to when Keith Freeman was the head coach.

Maybe it's time we stop blaming the coaching staff and start blaming the training staff*

*Please note I'm entirely joking, don't know anything about the women's team or women's basketball

[Some KenPom stats to give us hope:]

Some KenPom stats to give us hope:

Green Bay shoots a dreadful 29.8% from 3 point range, second worst in the conference. We are the 3rd best 3 point defense in the league allowing 34.8%. (NCAA average is 33.9%, we're not a good conference at defending the 3.)
Green Bay hits only 61.9% of their free throws, by far the worst in the conference. Our opponents have hit 71.0% of their free throws, something we can't really "defend" against, we've just played good FT shooting teams. Friday will not be one of those cases.
Green Bay's steal percentage is worse than CSU's. We survived that game with a victory and 19 turnovers. So we could project less turnovers against Green Bay. We also gave up 4 fast break points and 11 points off turnovers to CSU inspite our 19 turnovers.
Green Bay tends to slow teams to a crawling pace, forcing teams to take 19.3 seconds per possession. This is 35th slowest in the country. Luckily we play at a slow pace, averaging 18.3 seconds per possession. Green Bay plays a little quicker, 17.4 seconds per possession, and our average opponent will take 18.4 seconds per possession. It's why they are predicting the game go finish at 64-59

Somethings gotta give stats
Green Bay is the best 2 point shooting team in the league (37th best in the country) hitting 52.2% of their shots. We have the best 2 point shooting defense in the league (and 9th best in the country) allowing 41.3%. (NCAA average is 47.6%)
We have the best 3 point shooting team in the league hitting 37.9% of our attempts. Green Bay holds teams to 32.0% shooting from behind the arc, 2nd best in the conference.
Neither team gets their shots blocked. Green Bay is best in the league only having 7.9% of their shots blocked while Valpo is second with 8.0% of their shots getting rejected. But both teams block a lot of shots. 13.2% of the shots put up against Valpo are sent back whence it came, best in the league. Green Bay is (you guessed it!) second with 12.9% of the shots attempted against blocked.

Middle of the road stats
Green Bay's offense is ranked 5th in steals allowed, 9.7% of the time the possession results in a steal (tied with Valpo). Valpo's defense steals the ball 8.8% of the time which is ranked 4th in the conference. The NCAA average is 9.5. Not a super telling stat.
Green Bay's opponents have shot poorly from the FT line, hitting 64.5% of their shots. We hit 68.1% (about inline with the NCAA average of 68.8%), so maybe we can capitalize a little on this?

Stats that make you go Uh Oh.
Green Bay's adjusted defensive efficiency is ranked 12th in the country. The raw defensive efficiency is equally troubling, ranking at 25th in the country. Our offense is very middle of the pack with a 124 adjusted rank. We are ranked 40th in raw offensive efficiency, but that just shows we've played a very weak schedule.
The only statistical category their defense is ranked over 100 in is Free Throw attempts per Field Goal attempts, they allow .38 free throws for every field goal attempted. Unfortunately we're not built to (or our offense just doesn't) capitalize on this "deficiency" as we rank 250th on the offensive side of this stat. I use quotes for deficiency, because they are still in the top 200, and it's not killed them yet. In their 4 losses they've given up an average of 26 FTs, but teams only shot 64.7%, what's beaten Green Bay is their inability to shoot from downtown, hitting 20.3% of their 3s in losses.


Keys for Valpo:

• Force Green Bay to shoot threes and limit their second chances. McKinnie, Fouse, Mays and Lowe are all excellent on the offensive glass, and they capitalize on their second looks.
• Cut off the lane from Keither. If Sykes gets to the rim he will finish. As much as we laud Vashil, he won't stop him either, as he's deft at getting the bigger defender up in the air and drawing the foul or floating it over their outstreched arms. He's also capable of finding the open man (usually Mays or Lowe) after the big has left to try to block Keifer's lay up attempts. If you keep him on the perimeter he's a lot less dangerous than he is when he gets the ball in the lane.
• Get to the free throw line, then make them. They will get into foul trouble, you can take advantage of a less than deep bench and you can get to the line. Make the shots when you get them.

Right now we are 67th in KenPom. Green Bay is 52nd. We're a 5 point dog with a 29% chance of winning the game. It continues to be one of 2 games that we are underdogs in (@CSU we're a 1 point dog with 48% chance to win). With a win we would definitely overtake Green Bay, probably push that CSU game to a W with 51-52% chance to win.

The highest we've been since they've kept track of daily rank was 65th right before the NCAA game in 2013. We started that season ranked 131 and once conference season started we hovered between 69 and 77. Last year our best ranking was 113th on December 22nd.

For those wondering @Detroit ranks as a tougher game than the Green Bay @ home game (57% vs 60% chances to win.)