Xavier beat a flightless bird in a game of basketball last night. Well, that’s what I think happened. I was working and couldn’t see the entire game and just kept seeing references to an emu.
Hilarious(?) intros aside, Xavier is now 2-0 to start the season. It took awhile to get up through the gears last night, but once the Musketeers did, they eased away from an overmatched Eagles team who next play Great Lakes Christian of NCCAA DII. Great Lakes Christian started their season by playing Lake Michigan.
There is some sort of sub set thing happening there that I can’t figure out on three hours of sleep.
Xavier came out of the blocks slowly in this one. If, like me, you popped your head back into the office early in the game you would have seen Xavier down by seven and having already turned the ball over twice and missed three shots. One of those misses came from Ruben Dominguez (3/0/0), who is really struggling to shoot the ball so far this season and is 2-11 from behind the arc.
Eastern Michigan stretched the lead to 18-12 before X really responded. When they did, they nearly put the game away. It was Chance Westry (13/1/1) and Mike Nwoko (9/6/0) who got it going but Nikos Chitikoudis (9/6/0) was also instrumental in bullying the much thinner EMU front line. Eastern, to their credit, didn’t quit, but they also never really got back into the game. Xavier slowly stretched the lead until the dispatched the Eagles with a 15-2 run late where, to their discredit, it did like Eastern kind of quit.
Xavier is back in action against Detroit Mercy on Tuesday. Until the Musketeers take on Mississippi State in six days, they won’t really be tested. That doesn’t mean there aren’t takeaways from what has happened so far.
Xavier has real depth
Xavier’s leading scorer is Chance Westry, he comes off the bench. Xavier’s second most efficient player is Jovan Milicevic, he starts. Not only are ten guys playing, ten guys are playing more than 15 minutes. Coach Pitino won’t be able to go ten deep all season long, but knowing that he has the options will be a boon when it comes the middle of February.
Xavier may not be a great shooting team
In the first half the Musketeers made 10 of their 18 shots and went 2-10 from behind the arc. That got better in the second half, but Xavier wasn’t exactly shooting the eyes out of it. They ended up brutalizing EMU inside the arc, but the three point shooting across two games hasn’t been impressive. Maybe that changes if Dominguez gets going, but no one else has filled that gap yet.
This season will be different
After two games last season X had a scoring margin of +11. This year it is +68. That number alone doesn’t mean that the team is better, but it does mean that the Musketeers are easily handling the business in front of them. Crushing mediocre teams is something that good teams should do. It doesn’t mean the Musketeers are a Final Four contender. It does mean they aren’t bad themselves.
