When the Boston University women’s basketball team makes the five-minute bus ride and its fans make the six-hour T ride to Northeastern University on Saturday, it will face a Huskies team that is overmatched in almost every offensive category.
Northeastern scored 29 points in its loss to Binghamton on Wednesday. The Terriers scored 47 in a half alone against the University of Vermont. Senior guard Katie Terhune scored 22 in the first half of that game.
So, what does it make these Huskies? Big dogs with no bite? Bone-dry? Bore-eastern? They’ve got virtually nothing on the Terriers on paper.
Except wins.
The Terriers (7-7, 2-3 America East) come into the game averaging 68.5 points per game as the second-highest scoring team in the America East, but after dropping three of five conference games, they find themselves sixth out of 10 teams in the pack. The cross-town Huskies (9-5, 3-2), who rank sixth in scoring with 62.2 ppg, are giving the Terriers an unpleasant view as they march ahead of them at fourth in the conference.
Air Buds, they’re not. The Huskies’ defense, however, has pulled the sled all season long. They’ve allowed 58.9 points per game, second-lowest in the America East. They allowed 44 points in the loss to Binghamton, a game that saw less excitement than the Gore household.
That isn’t to say that Northeastern doesn’t have the ability to score. The Huskies scored a season-high 91 against the University of Maryland, Baltimore County on Jan. 17, thanks to a 39-point effort from sophomore Maralene Zwarich.
Besides making more baskets than the wildest Pennsylvania Dutch New Year’s party, Zwarich pulled down nine rebounds on the night to finish the week averaging 28 points and 10 rebounds. Those numbers were good enough to make her America East Player of the Week for a second consecutive week.
But the Terriers won’t look to zone in on Zwarich, junior forward Larissa Parr said. That would only open holes for the other Huskies to make the situation hairy for the Terriers.
“We try not to focus on the star player,” she said. “If you do that, the other players have career days. Basically we’re going to focus on guard defense. We’re probably going to work on dribble drives in general, because that’s what they like to do … We want to stop plays any good guards would do.”
In order to take the split in the Beanpot series – they lost at Harvard on Dec. 14 – the Terriers will need to rebound from a 73-65 loss to the University of Maine Wednesday. After its convincing 91-65 win over Vermont in a game they dominated from start to finish, BU left more than Boston behind when they made the trek to Orono to take on Maine.
On the ride home from the 73-65 loss to the Black Bears, more than the Hub’s lights shone down on the Terriers’ situation.
“We watched the tape on the way home, which was fun,” Parr said with a sarcastic laugh. “What we noticed is that we weren’t playing together, running our sets or trusting each other on defense. We should never play like that ever again … We took ourselves out of everything – we beat ourselves … But, even though it was Maine, we were still in it. That shows how good we are when we’re playing our worst.”
Nevermind just rebounding from the loss. The Terriers will need to win the battle of the boards, Parr said. And contrary to their respective mascots, it’s the Huskies that are the “scrappy” ones, she said – not the Terriers. Expect a role reversal this weekend.
“They’re really good at hustle points,” Parr said. “And we have been known to be not so good at hustling. We need to hit the floor and go for all the loose balls. We need to one-up them … They’re not going to expect that from us, because we’ve never been a scrappy team. We have the potential, but we need to go all out.”
Tip-off is set for 1 p.m. on the parquet of Matthews Arena.
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