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Was flipping around different channels tonight and saw the end of a TBT game on ESPN. The Arkansas team won the game on a sweet offhand move by Brandon Wood.

Brandon Wood is just pure silk.  The guy belongs in the NBA.

I just saw that Brandon Wood is on the Mad Ants training camp roster. Hopefully he gets some run with the Mad Ants, they're playing their games at Gainbridge Fieldhouse this season as they move from Fort Wayne to the Indy suburbs.


https://x.com/TheMadAnts/status/1718404458382553598?s=20

I'm not going to be harsh on the staff for this year's games since they have not had the time to put together an MVC worthy non-conference schedule. I will commend them on two things, they were able to secure 2 power conference road games and we only have one non-D1 this year where we have been playing at least 2 in recent seasons. This schedule will provide good opportunities for team chemistry growth, but the lack of quality mid majors does have me concerned for our conference slate.

I came into this season thinking this was Lottich's last chance to get me to believe he can be the guy and he absolutely failed. No matter what we do this offseason, I am not going to be hyped for next season if Lottich is still at the helm which he more than likely will be.

Another theme I see after the last 5 seasons in particular is fans saying "where we would be if we didn't have all these injuries"? Maybe you can make that claim if it happens one season, but when it happens repeatedly, there's something wrong with the player development/conditioning aspect. Here Drake has severe injuries to some of their top guys the last couple of years and they still made the MVC championship both years and won an NCAA game last season. I'm tired of the injury excuse. Either fix that problem internally or bring guys in that aren't injury prone.

I wish I had anything good to say regarding this season, but I really can't come up with anything. I guess I can say I hope we decide to go down the route of bringing more transfers up from D-II than bringing guys down from the Big Ten. Most of the guys we bring in from power conferences are on the bench at their schools for a reason. I didn't hate the play of King, Kithier and especially Anderson when he was healthy, but they also didn't really get us close to achieving a goal at a conference championship. Kevion at least was our most consistent shooter and scorer this year and I'd be more inclined to get guys that are imo, more motivated to jump up and play at our level than power conference guys having to transfer down.

Next year's team should be much better. It could be the year that pivots the program in a positive direction.

How many times have I heard this before? I'm not falling for it this time.

I'm with you, I'm done drinking the kool-aid as long as Lottich is the coach. Frankly, I see a slew of players transferring out this offseason and we're probably going to be stuck with a bunch of end of the bench the Big Ten players again (to be fair, Anderson was playing good ball til his injury, but Lottich also knew he had injury problems coming in so I'm not letting him off the hook for that either).

The bright side is we play Evansville and Indiana State next.  Very winnable games and then we are only 1 game from .500.

We have to play at SIU before those two games, but if we play like this, we won't beat anybody.

How long until everyone is convinced there is no offensive scheme Lottich has put together for this team? There was no sign of any kind of set plays that half. Bradley defended our offense with ease. We don't have players fast enough to beat defenders or strong enough players to post up. This is so beyond frustrating!

UIC to the MVC , not the school I'd have picked but regionally it Mayes sense I suppose

I was down down on them initially too but I'm wholly on board now. This has a chance to be a big time addition one day. They have a high overall athletics budget good facilities and the Chicago market is so very important to the MVC and to basketball recruiting in general. Their endowment and enrollment are growing by leaps and bounds which means there is strong potential for future athletic and academic growth. I think it would be foolish to expect Loyola level results but they could be really really good if they commit to basketball and we  give them a few years' time.

I'm good with UIC now that we have Belmont and Murray State on board. I've never been to Gentile arena at Loyola to compare with UIC, but I do think UIC Pavilion is a good venue for the conference. Who knows if UIC takes off like Loyola, UIC has been more middle of the pack in the Horizon League than Loyola was when they entered The Valley. It would not shock me at all if they start to have greater success in the near future. As a Valpo fan, I get concerned that three more teams are going to enter the conference, pass us up and not look back leaving us in the cellar. I hope we start pulling our weight sooner than later.

We played two games in a row against teams without their best player and barely squeaked by

And one of those teams, namely Indiana State, still playing without one of their best players, just knocked off Missouri State.

And that Missouri State team clapped us on our home court. We are in no way, shape or form close to the level Missouri State is at right now because Indiana State beat them.


I only truly care about what we do against our competition, and to me, what we have done to this point in the season has not raised my expectations. We still have far too many flaws with this team to talk about competing for a conference title which is what we came into the Valley to do. Maybe I'm watching a different game from everyone else, but if we can't hit layups more consistently or defend the 3 better, we're not beating any of the top 4 teams in St. Louis.

I was just about to say that Vok, that is the big difference, they have achieved the goal of making the tourney twice in that stretch which gives Wardle the comfort of not being on a hot seat.


That said, it is true Bradley's record in that timeframe is very mediocre. However, I'm getting sick of Valpo being compared with mediocre. We joined the MVC to elevate our program further and we have squandered this opportunity. I still want that to see that program from the first half of the 2010s with a winners mentality from the program and fans. But right now it doesn't seem like that is a reality.


As for tonight, it's a must win to avoid Thursday. We played two games in a row against teams without their best player and barely squeaked by. I'm not sure what Henry's health status is for tonight, but whether he's in or out, we need to play a hell of a lot better than the last two games if we want to make noise the rest of the season.[/quote]

We have only 1 1/2 pages of comment after an exciting and important road victory.

The problem is we just barely beat two teams that didn't have their best player. I didn't watch the game live and watched it later, but the fact is that we can't hit layups consistently and cry about not getting a foul called going up and missing each time. To me, that tells me our players are soft.


We have to win the next three home games for there to be any discussion about trying to avoid Thursday. Even if we do that, I still am not seeing any real progress with running actual offensive sets and giving up way too many wide open 3s (we also give up way too many uncontested layups). I hope we see some improvements in those areas before long because right now no matter which round we play in St. Louis, I see us as a one and done.

Great games from Taylor, Kithier and Anderson.

Now, we just beat a team that didn't have their top guy (possibly best player in the league) and Carter who had lit us up all night went out with cramps before overtime.  We had a 7 point lead with 1:25 to go and we blew it. We almost squandered it in overtime too. I'm glad we won, but Valpo had better pull off a nice streak of wins to get me to get excited about them again.

On a positive note, we beat the team I think we match up with worst in the conference so glad we at least split with them.

Can we just for once, defend a 3 point shooter???

Leave it to a Lottich led team to not only not excuse the after timeout play, but to turn it over and give UNI two more easy points before the break. This is seriously pissing me off.

Seriously, who is teaching these guys how to shoot? We can't throw a rock in the ocean!

I don't know about you, but nothing there looks like any form of defensive scheme has been put together for this game. How the hell is UNI getting all these clean drives to the basket? No form of adjustments have been made!!!

What could a coach do, when EVERYONE on the team, is making bone-headed passes, dribbles/drives, and missing defensive assignments?  That is allllll on the players.

Veteran players at that.

If everyone on the team is playing this bad, it certainly points to ill preparedness by the coach. If the gameplan is going as Lottich drew it up, then he's not recruiting good enough players cause we look completely outmatched against a 5-7 team.

How did this team win 8 games?!?! I wasn't going to jynx it earlier, but with how well we had been with not turning it over combined with UNI not being amazing at takeaways screamed a huge turnover game for Valpo. Who is seriously going to defend Lottich after this game? This team looks beyond unprepared and out of their depth in this one. No excuse!

If we rebound, defend the 3, and have TK back we will be ok. 

I'm expecting a good game.  I'd put Kobe on AJ Green. 

We have rebound and defend the 3 significantly better than the ISU game or we will get blown out of the water. UNI may be the team we match up with worst in the league so we need to have a near flawless game. We also need to peep doing a good job holding onto the ball and keep making our free throws.

I frankly do not expect us to win this game. To really get hyped about this team, we need to win a game here and there than we're not expected to win as well as not lose games you should win. A win tonight would at least to me go a long way to showing me this team is heading in the right direction getting into league play.

First off, gotta give some props for Gordon's play. I certainly have not been shy about my comments regarding his play this season, but he absolutely balled today.

Honestly I liked what we did on offense most of the game, but we need to set up more cuts to the basket for easy layups to offset these scoring droughts we have when jump shots aren't falling. Trevor needs to be one of our focal guys on offense, he has done so much good for us on offense this year he should be taking more shots.

Defensively, I don't feel any different than I have, I think we still gave too many open three shots to ISU and they just missed a lot of them. And of course, we can't rebound to save our lives but we also didn't have our good rebounding big in today.

Glad we got this win, going to be a very tough stretch now.

So we decided to play offense today but no defense. Giving up 36 in the first half to one of the worst offensive teams in the country doesn't make me feel too good about this despite us being up by 14.

Good halves from Kobe, Sheldon and Kevion though!

I don't want to hear anything about playing good defense today, giving up 11-17 from 3 and over 50% from the field is not good defense.

And I am getting sick of hearing about all the good looks we're getting. Good teams connect on those good looks, we don't, this is getting ridiculous!

How do we not know how to pass out of a double team??? Surely someone was going to start doubling up Krikke and Kithier in the post. Someone come help them out!!!

Also whoever the shooting coach on this team is needs to be fired. I'm sick of us being towards the bottom of the country in jump shot percentage!

Good to see Kithier play better today, but why can't Krikke and Kithier have good games together? The longer the season goes, the more the "need more time to gel" excuse gets old.

How does Krikke miss that layup??? Why are we sleepwalking today???

I'm really getting frustrated that some of  our older players don't know how to properly pass as basketball. Until we panacked in the last 5 minutes, our handling of the ball was pretty good, but we literally handed Drake the victory at the end with turnovers and missed free throws.

I don't know how to process this game. Obviously I'm pissed we lost, but there were some really good offensive and defensive sets tonight. I will say this, if Sheldon isn't frontrunner right now for MVC defensive player of the year, I don't know who is. He just makes stops and locks guys down.