After a not-as-comfortable-as-we-hoped win against CSU-Pueblo, the Lobos return to action Friday for another exhibition game, this time against Rogers State. The D-II Hillcats are coming off of a game against future UNM opponent Oral Roberts where they hung tight with the Golden Eagles for most of the game before eventually falling 82-74, meaning that the Lobos weren’t the only ones with a less-than-stellar opener against a lower division team. That also means that the Lobos need to be ready, as the Hillcats are going to come in thinking that they can pull out a victory.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Rogers State, like me before I started working on this, the university is located in Claremore, OK, which is not only fairly close to Tulsa but also apparently where the musical Oklahoma! takes place (I’m sure that’s in the scouting report). Their mascot is a Hillcat, which was made up by the school and comes from the fact that the campus sits on top of a hill and that the students like cats, I guess. As for the basketball team, it is relatively new to competing in D-II, having only made the move from NAIA in 2013, and is still a candidate for membership into D-II, so they are still ineligible for postseason play. That said, they’re still able to compete for the regular season title for the Heartland Conference, which they almost won last season when they finished only a game back of St. Mary’s. This year, they were picked 5th in the conference preseason poll, mostly because they lost four seniors, including two of their top three scorers and their leading rebounder. They did pick up a few D-1 transfers, so time will tell if they can fill the voids left by the graduated seniors.
As we might expect from a D-II team, the Hillcats don’t have much size on their roster. In fact, their starting lineup consists of a 6’8” post, a 6’4” forward, and three 6’1” guards. Perhaps unsurprisingly with that lineup, they took quite a few three point attempts in their first game, shooting 25 times from deep while making seven of them (which is 28%). Overall, they didn’t shoot particularly well against ORU, only making 41.5% of their shots, but they made up for it by outrebounding the Golden Eagles 40-29, which let them take 13 more shots. Their leading scorer was J.C. Hartzler, who is also the leading returning scorer from last year’s team. He and Donald Moore look like the team’s sharpshooters, with Hartzler averaging 36.4% and Moore averaging 38.8% last season. One of the ways that this team is most dangerous is their free throw shooting. Last season, the team shot 77.6% from the line and they kept it going in their first game, hitting 81.3% of their free throws. Keeping them off the line will certainly give the Lobos a better chance at an easy win.
Here are a few things to watch out for from the Lobos:
Cullen Neal, Point Guard
Despite scoring a ridiculous 33 points on 17 shots, despite dishing out 7 assists, and despite even managing to collect four rebounds, it seemed like a lot of fans couldn’t get past his big 8 in the turnover column. To be fair, that is a lot of turnovers for a single player to have and Cullen knows that as well as any of us. However, that shouldn’t take away from his performance on Tuesday and it definitely shouldn’t mean that Noodles has to move him to the off-guard already. Cullen will make mistakes with the ball at times, there’s no doubt about it, but I think that it’s more likely that those 8 turnovers are the most we’ll see out of him in a game this season than it is that he’ll surpass that total. This game will give him a good chance to show that Tuesday’s performance is more of an outlier than the norm, especially as he’s going to be going against a bunch of smaller guards, and hopefully silence a couple of his detractors (although that one guy in your section would still complain about him, for sure).
Bigs Issues
Because this is another team with no one over 6’8”, I figured that there would be a decent chance that we won’t see Big Nik again this game, but Noodles has assured us that’s not the case. So that’s great! It will be fun to see him play and there’s the added bonus that he’s going to look absolutely massive against the Hillcats. As far as the rest of the bigs go, given the size advantage that they had against CSU-Pueblo, I think that it would have been nice to see more out of the guys that did play, particularly Devon and Joe. Rogers State is also undersized, so this is another opportunity for them to show that they can take advantage against smaller teams, which will give them more playing time against the Boise States of the world. They are certainly capable of doing just that and they will need to be able to, because there are certainly a few teams on the schedule that they will need to be ready for.
Staying Hot
Unlike last season, where they had ugly shooting games in their two exhibitions, the Lobos already managed to have a good shooting performance from downtown. It would be a really good sign for the season, in my opinion, if they followed it up with another strong performance. In theory, the Hillcats are going to have to collapse down low to stop the Lobos’ low post offense, so the shooters should be able to get some open looks. Knocking those down would be an immediate improvement from last season. It would also be nice to see them make their free throws.