Hilltoppers Miss Chance to Dance

Most fans loved the Hilltoppers’ draw for the Sun Belt tournament. Conference champ South Alabama, season nemesis North Texas, and hated rival Middle Tennessee were all on the opposite side of the bracket. The Tops had to navigate one of the Florida schools and either Arkansas State or New Orleans. The Hilltoppers did dispatch FAU in the quarterfinals, but were outgunned by Adrian Banks and out-muscled by the Arkansas State frontcourt in the semifinals.

The Indians used a whopping 35-20 rebounding edge and sizzling shooting from the free throw line (26-28) to oust WKU on Monday night. With those numbers, any team would expect to win. Ironically, it would not have taken much for the Tops to win this game. They got up eight more field goal attempts than ASU, and tallied one more field goal. They also forced 16 Indian turnovers, while committing just nine. Any team with those numbers would expect to win as well.

Ultimately, the Tops’ demise came down to a lack of identity. The WKU roster has good, quality depth. This team was built to press, run, trap, jump, and shoot threes. The problem since sometime in December has been that they have not been pressing that much. At some point, the Tops lost confidence in what they were assembled to do, and it affected them greatly over the last half of the season. This team was not built to guard lumbering post players in the half court or to box out behemoths in half-court sets. It was built to speed teams up and wear them down. It simply did not happen in enough games this season.

Coach Horn will have six seniors on the roster next season. He also has some serious size on the way in Japeth Aguilar (6’9”), D.J. Magley (6’10”), and A’Darius Pegues (6’9”), along with highly regarded 6’7” swingman B.J. Frazier. A.J. Slaughter and Orlando Mendez-Valdez have shown that they are talented, hard-working players that can improve during the course of a season. Courtney Lee will be among the best swingmen in the country and Tyrone Brazelton has shown that he can get to the basket just about anytime that he wants. There are a host of heady role players returning as well, as the Tops lose only Butch Jointer to graduation.

All indicators are that next year’s team will be extremely deep, talented, and experienced. In fact, that will almost always be the case with Coach Horn’s teams. But, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what WKU was trying to do defensively this season. Job one in the off-season is to develop a defensive identity.