Reply To: Pre season rankings.

Forum Forum Lehigh Sports Lehigh Men’s Basketball Pre season rankings. Reply To: Pre season rankings.

#33184
Bison137
Bison137
Participant

[quote quote=33177]Going into this season Bucknell the consensus #1. They got hammered tonight by Northeastern. Not sure what that means but if tbey are the #1 then Bball may be a repeat of a weak PL football season.[/quote]

It’s easy to cherry pick one game and try to draw conclusions from it – but not very meaningful. As pointed out, Bucknell has been inconsistent. But they do have some quality wins – Vermont (who almost beat Kentucky) and Ball State (who did beat Notre Dame). Also as noted, close games vs Maryland and UNC. Their loss to Northeastern last night was easily their worst game of the year. The loss at St. Joes was really a function of missing virtually every open 3-pointer. They didn’t play badly overall.

One issue is that Bucknell is missing two starters – both of whom also started last year: All-PL guard Kimbal Mackenzie, who had surgery for a torn abdominal muscle; and wing Avi Toomer, who is a very good defender. The loss of those two players has certainly had an impact. Also Mackenzie earlier tried to play through the injury and his inability to shoot cost them a win at Monmouth, which they lost by a point. He went from being a 41% 3-point shooter last year to under 30% this year.

Bucknell’s Pomeroy ranking has fallen to #103 after the bad loss last night – but it was #135 at the same stage last year. One thing of note is that they have the 11th toughest OOC schedule in the nation (after adjusting for teams that played games vs D2/D3 teams) – by far the hardest of any PL school.