When Niagara head coach Chris Casey dissects the reason the Purple Eagles were struggling defensively he points to one statistic.
“Our big thing is rebounding the ball,” Casey said. “We didn’t rebound the ball defensively and that hurts your defensive field goal percentage.”
The Purple Eagles ranked 304th nationally in defensive rebounding percentage last season. Poor numbers in the rebounding area led to Niagara’s bottom ranking in field goal percentage defense, allowing opponents to shoot 48.6% from the field, ranking amongst the bottom 10 teams in all of Division I in the category.
“We have to guard off the dribble better,” Casey said. “I thought we got pretty good at guarding patterns and individual plays, we were not at guarding the basketball and keeping guys in front of us.”
Despite the defensive struggles, the Purple Eagles held three opponents under a point per possession in the final month of the season. Freshmen Ramone Snowden showed signs as a play maker who can grab rebounds, while Wesley Myers showed the ability to be an impact scorer opposite Antoine Mason, who led the MAAC in points per game last season. The loss of Marcus Ware though means that Casey is definitely going to need to find another big man that can help keep opponents off the glass.
“We have to take steps forward,” Casey said. “We have to improve on last year. If you make constant improvement then you know you’re moving in the right direction.”
“We did some good things this year, I thought our guys fought and battled for everything, which is really what you want out of them. Now we have to get some more positive results from that.”
When moving forward into spring individual workouts for the first time in his tenure, Casey said that they need all their returners to take a step forward.
“I think when you’re established and you want to take a step forward, you can point to one or two guys that you need to jump up to get better, we’re by no means established,” Casey said. “We need everybody to get better. We have to improve with our roster that played, our guys that are sitting out have to come in and help us and we have to improve through recruiting.”
Year one showed signs of a group that will battle in close games, despite going 3-8 in games determined by four points or fewer, but Casey said moving into next season they would like to see results similar to their first round MAAC tournament win over Marist.
“They didn’t fold their tent at any point, they kept playing hard and I was happy for them that they got some results in the tournament,” Casey said. “We were right there in a number of games, but you know that right there’s not good enough. We have to, in order to change those close ones to the W ledger, we have to get better.”
Ryan Restivo covers the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, the America East conference and Hofstra for Big Apple Buckets. You can follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanarestivo or contact Ryan at rrestivo[at]nycbuckets.com.
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