“I don’t even know how to answer that,” Trey Calvin shrugged.
“I don’t know what to tell you there,” Scott Nagy admitted a few minutes later.
Wright State’s star guard and then its veteran coach were both asked why Western Kentucky — so easily and embarrassingly — had been able to drive right through the Raiders’ so-called defense for lay-up after lay-up after lay-up down the stretch in the Hilltoppers come-from-behind, 91-84, victory at the Nutter Center on Tuesday night.
In the final 81 seconds, Western Kentucky scored three straight times with lay-ups.
“You look at the last two minutes and the number of lay-ups we gave up and it was incredible” Nagy said.
In the second half — after trailing 43-40 at intermission and by as many as eight earlier in the game — Western Kentucky made 12 lay-ups against the Raiders.
Pressed on why this happened, everybody — including Western Kentucky’s Don McHenry, who finished with a career-high 30 points that included six lay-ups — ventured a different guess.
“Uummmm…we just let them get lay-ups,” Calvin, who had a season-high 34 points, finally said. “We didn’t stop them in the paint. We weren’t physical. We weren’t communicating enough.”
McHenry thought WSU might have run out of gas … and grit:
“We got in our minds, this team’s got to be tired. The way we play, with lots of subs, that keeps our bodies fresh. We knew in that time we had an advantage over them fatigue-wise.
“Our coach emphasized to not worry about drawing fouls. That we should just finish the plays We went in aggressively and our bigs sealed off their bigs inside.
“Down the stretch we just knew it was winning time and we kicked it into another gear.”
Wright State — now 4-6 — knew that too, but still couldn’t stop the Hilltoppers.
As he wrestled with what had just happened, Nagy talked about his team still not appreciating how important defense is: “At some point, I have to be able to communicate and get the point across about our defense.”
He said if the problem was a strategy issue, “that’s definitely on me. We could probably just stand around in a zone and look like a liquor store robbery and do as good of a job as we did out there.”
And then he touched on a thought that portends to a bigger problem:
“I don’t know, maybe we’re just physically not capable (of doing what’s needed on defense). That could be a possibility, where we’re physically not strong enough or quick enough. And at some point, I’ve got to be able to make that change.”
In this game, Western Kentucky, for the most part, had the more athletically-talented players on the court.
McHenry, a 6-foot-2 junior transfer from Indian Hills Community College, was one such player for the 8-3 Hilltoppers. As a high school player at the Milwaukee Academy of Science, he averaged 38 points per game as a senior and led the state of Wisconsin in scoring.
Credit: Joseph R. Craven
Credit: Joseph R. Craven
His college career began at NCAA Division II Hawaii Hilo, where he started and averaged 15.2 points Last season at Indian Hills he was named the Iowa Community College Athletic Association Player of the Year and was a National Junior College All American.
He joined Western Kentucky this year when Steve Lutz took over as head coach.
The past two seasons Lutz came to Dayton each March with his Texas A&M Corpus Christi team for the NCAA First Four Tournament. The Islanders won here last season before falling to Alabama in the first round.
That was enough to get the former Purdue assistant to Western Kentucky, where he promptly found himself in need of talented replacements. The star of the team, guard Dayvion McKnight, a three-time Conference USA all-league player and 1,000-point scorer, transferred to Xavier, where he had 20 points in a victory over Cincinnati the other night.
The team’s 7-foot-5 Jamarion Sharp, who led the nation in blocked shots the past two seasons, jumped to Ole Miss, where he now has now has 21 blocks for the 9-0 Rebels.
Twelve players on the Western Kentucky roster started their college careers elsewhere.
Nagy talked about the talented team Lutz has assembled.
Calvin noted how it was a “real physical, real fast-paced game. As soon as we scored, they came right back down at us.”
Nagy said: “We’re not used to that kind of pressure. We don’t see it in practice.”
While the Raiders might not be able to simulate it in practice, they also don’t see it when they play teams like Bethel, the NAIA team from Indiana they beat by 19 at the Nutter Center five days earlier. The same goes for Muskingum, the Division III team they’ll face at home in eight days.
Those teams don’t have the across-the-board talent that other foes on this year’s schedule — Western Kentucky, Davidson and most Mid-American Conference teams — have.
Wright State has some bone-fide standouts — Calvin is the team leader; Tanner Holden is working toward his old form after spending a year of limited playing time at Ohio State — but to win night after night, the Raiders must be able to have a dependable defense and a solid rebounding presence, both which were lacking against Western Kentucky.
The Hilltoppers outrebounded Wright State, 25-11, in the second half. They also shot 55.6 percent in the second half, which is understandable when 24 of your points come on lay-ups.
“We didn’t come out ready to go in the second half,” Holden admitted.
“They just physically whipped us,’ Nagy said. “We can’t continue to score 84 points and lose basketball games. It’s hard to be good enough offensively and not good enough defensively.
“It’s a bad feeling.”
About the Author