The Boston University men’s basketball team will look to snap its two-game losing streak against Patriot League foe Lehigh University on Saturday in Pennsylvania.
This will be the second of a two-game road trip for the Terriers (8-12, 4-5 Patriot League), who are 3-7 away from Agganis Arena this season.
BU enters this contest following a tough 71-67 loss Thursday against the United States Military Academy after the teams were tied with 5:44 remaining before the Black Knights (14-6, 5-4 Patriot League) went on a 15-11 run to end the game.
“Offensively, we’ve been fine,” said BU coach Joe Jones. “We’ve been struggling on the defensive end. We probably surprised ourselves with the way we have been scoring. I thought we’d be much better defensively, but for some reason, we are struggling to pick up shots. Some of it is that we aren’t very experienced, but you can’t keep saying that. At some point, you got to turn the corner. We got to find a way to create stops. When we do that, we are a whole lot better.”
Coming into this game, the Terriers rank near the top of the Patriot League in offense, scoring 67.3 points per contest. Lehigh (10-10, 4-5 Patriot League) is right on BU’s heels, scoring just a tenth of a point less than BU per contest.
BU has gotten consistent offensive production from a variety of sources this year. The Terriers are led by the stellar play of sophomore guard Cedric Hankerson, who is one of the Patriot League’s top scorers with an average of 17.1 points per game.
Although fellow sophomore guard Eric Fanning is the only other player to average double figures in points with 10 on the year, BU has seen growth in junior guard John Papale (9.7 ppg) and junior forward Nathan Dieudonne (9.8 ppg). Dieudonne could be in a position to grab a double-double against Lehigh as each of the six in his career have come on the road.
After losing their three top scorers from a season ago, the Terriers have done a nice job of finding a balance on the offensive end despite some struggles.
However, BU has faltered on defense this year. Save for the efforts of Hankerson, who set a program record with nine steals against American University Jan. 21, opposing teams have not had much trouble getting to the rim. The Terriers have allowed more than 89 points three times this year, and are surrendering the third-most points per contest in the Patriot League.
This should prove to be a close contest as even though Lehigh has a better overall record than BU, they are both in the middle of the pack in the Patriot League standings.
The Mountain Hawks come into this matchup following a 68-62 loss at the hands of Bucknell University on Wednesday. This was a crushing defeat as Lehigh led by as many as 16 during the second-half.
Freshman Kahron Ross led the way for the Mountain Hawks in the loss, scoring 18 points, half of which came from three 3-point shots. Lehigh’s leading scorer, 6-foot-10 center Tim Kempton, was in foul trouble throughout the game and contributed 11 points and six boards short of his season averages of 14.2 points and 8.8 rebounds.
“He’s a guy that you got to make work for everything that he gets,” Jones said of Kempton. “He’s a talented kid. He can do a lot of different things. We have our hands full with him. We just got to be ready and compete against him and make him work.”
This is a critical game for both teams as they try to move up in the standings and make a run in the Patriot League, Jones said.
“We got to show some maturity and get ourselves ready to go,” he said. “That’s the big thing, being ready to go tomorrow in practice and getting ready for Saturday. If we can go out Saturday and get this one, I think it would really help us with our maturity level on a consistent basis and get us back to winning games.”
Nick Neville is a junior in COM studying journalism and the Sports Editor of the Daily Free Press. When he's not making a paper on Beacon Street, you can catch him working as a Sports Correspondent for the Boston Globe or helping to produce BU's only professional sports talk show, Offsides. Follow him on Twitter: @n_nebs95
