Hope 68 Edgewood 64

Short and sweat since I did not attend this game and plan on writing something before we start league play on Wednesday  Thursday.  Hope pulled out another game in a virtual carbon copy performance to the Thomas More game.  Hope's one time 20 point advantage quickly disappeared at the start of the second half and they found themselves having to claw back this victory.  In the end Hope did enough things to win, but not enough things in the final couple minutes to put it away so fans weren't on the edge of their seats.  Hope missed 6 ft's in the games final 6 minutes including the front end of two one for one's.  Those are 8 points that would make the following score look a lot better.

Hope 68 Edgewood 64
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Efficiency:

Estimated number of possessions:  Hope 74  Edgewood 73
Wasn't expecting this many possessions with neither team reaching 70 points.

Offensively Efficiency:  99.96

Pretty meh after 5 pretty good games in a row.  The game was opposite halves with Hope decidedly winning the first, Edgewood the second.  First half efficiency was 112, the second half was a pretty horrible 84.  It was just hard for Hope to score in the 2nd half.

Defensive Efficiency:  98.23

This is fine had Hope been able to maintain its first-half offense.  First half was 83, which is excellent, 2nd half 111.  A let down at both ends of the court is usually not very acceptable.

Rebounding Efficiency:

Hope:  40.6% of available offensive rebounds
Edgewood: 25.0% of available offensive rebounds

This is really where this game was won.  Edgewood came into this a pretty solid +5 for the year with some pretty good offensive rebounding numbers.  Hope won this battle to the tune of 18-8 in 2nd chance points.  Overall won the battle inside as well with 36 points in the paint to 18.

Game Score:

3rd star-  Grant Neil, Hope  9.8
sneaky production

2nd star-  Brock Benson, Hope  10.8
Big minutes as Hope fought off foul troubles

1st star-   Brett Meinecke, Edgewood  12.4
Sometimes a guy just plays well, came into this one shooting under 30% from 3, he went 5-8.

Hope's scoring was very balanced.  If there was a 4th star it would have been Nate VanArendonk.  Nate was very influential in the early part of the game.

Going Forward: 

That wraps up the non-conference portion of the schedule at 6-5, pretty much what I envisioned though it would have been nice to pick off one of the big boys along the way.  Young teams can be an adventure, Hope could have lost a couple other games but found ways to pull them out in the end.  What you hope of course is that you are better now than when you started and that you'll be better 2 months from now.  Overall this schedule was tough.

We dive right into the heart of the MIAA schedule with Trine on Wednesday Thursday then its off to that other school on Saturday.  Fun!


Up Next:
Me vs  not reliving the winter of 1978, please don't be that.  

Thurday Jan 9. vs Trine at DeVos Fieldhouse (weather permitting)