The Boston University women’s basketball team will be hitting the road on Wednesday for the first of its final two games of the season.
After dropping both of their final two home games, the Terriers (5-22, 2-14 Patriot League) head to West Point, New York to take on the United States Military Academy in its penultimate game of the 2014-15 season.
As the Terriers hit the road, they’ll be looking to snap a four-game losing streak as well as their first victory away from Case Gym this season, but the Black Knights (20-6, 12-4 Patriot League) will do anything but make it easy for them.
Saturday, the Black Knights dropped a 45-42 contest to Patriot League-leading American University. The setback effectively snapped Army’s 11-game win streak and was its third loss of 2015.
Despite Saturday’s outcome, Army has been overpowering opponents in 2015. During their 11-game streak, the Black Knights averaged just fewer than 61 points per game and won each contest by an average of 9.36 points per game.
Without a question, the Black Knights’ success has been largely due to junior Kelsey Minato. On the year, she is leading the Patriot League in scoring, averaging 22.3 points per game, and is also just one of two players in the league averaging greater than 40 percent from behind the 3-point arc. During Army’s winning streak, the guard continued her dominance, scoring fewer than 20 points just three times.
One of her best performances of the season was on Jan. 29, when she single-handedly decimated the Terriers, dropping 30 points and going 8-of-10 from deep, on the way to a 65-40 Army victory.
This time out, BU coach Katy Steding said she wants to make sure her team limits Minato’s opportunities.
“[We need to] stay close to her, hopefully not giving her too many open looks,” she said. “Our defense are reviewing film, and we discussed [how last time] their actions didn’t hurt us as much as we might have thought. What hurt us was defensive breakdowns like not boxing out, like not being close to a wide open shooter, that kind of thing. We need to play through every possession and make sure we get the ball back before we relax.”
While they had a rough go of things their last time out against Army, the Terriers are an improved team, and much of that has been due to the play of redshirt junior guard Troi Melton. While the Terriers as a whole have been struggling, Melton has been able to succeed. In her last three games, Melton is averaging 18.7 points, 3.7 rebounds and one block and is two games removed from a career night against American (19-8, 14-2 Patriot League), in which she dropped 23 points and went 9-for-15 from the floor.
In her last game against Army, she was held scoreless while going 0-for-5 from the floor.
BU’s scoring-leader sophomore guard Meghan Green has been in a little bit of a slump lately. Though she is averaging 12.1 points per game, her 20-point showing against Bucknell University Saturday was just the second time Green scored double-digit points in her last six games.
Both Green and Melton will have to be working overtime to be able to score against an Army team that only allows a league-leading 52.4 points per game. Minato’s hot hands, Army’s staunch defense and the Terriers inability to score a lot of points — they’re second to last in the league, averaging just 55.7 points per game — will all make Saturday’s contest one of their more difficult challenges of the season.
Overall, Steding said she has confidence in the way her defense has been playing, but in order to stand a chance against the Black Knights, they’ll need more than that.
“Every game for us is a tale of two sides of the ball,” Steding said. “I think we do a fairly decent job defensively most times getting to the spots and talking our kids through the actions, but then we don’t finish plays. [We] offensively run a look, but we get tunnel vision on one outcome instead of seeing the big picture.”
