Preview: Wright State vs. Butler

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About Wright State
The Raiders climbed above .500 in Horizon League play with consecutive home wins against UIC and Loyola last week. Mays returned from a one-game absence because of an Achilles tendon injury to score 33 points (with 19-of-20 free throws) against UIC and 16 points against Loyola. He leads the league in scoring in conference games, at 17.5 points per game. The Raiders have also been good defensively, leading the conference in scoring defense (57.4) and turnover margin (plus-4.1) in league games. But WSU continues to struggle offensively, ranking ninth in the league in scoring offense (58.3) and last in field goal percentage (39.1) for the season. Battle leads the team in rebounding, at 3.9 per game.



About Butler
The Bulldogs lost consecutive road games against Wisconsin-Milwaukee (53-42) and UW-Green Bay (80-68) last week and are 3-4 in their last seven games. Like WSU, Butler has trouble scoring, ranking 270th nationally in scoring offense (63.2) and 307th in field goal percentage (39.9). Smith is the only Bulldogs player averaging in double figures in scoring, although he had just two points in 21 minutes against Green Bay in the last game. Jones, a freshman from O?Fallon, Ill., had 16 points and eight rebounds against Green Bay, and he has started 17 of 22 games this season. The preseason Horizon League favorite, Butler dropped into a tie with Wright State and Detroit for fifth place largely due to its scoring difficulty.


FYI
WSU is 1-9 in its past 10 against Butler, including a 63-62 defeat at the Nutter Center on Jan. 6. The only Raiders win in that stretch came Jan. 16, 2011, by a score of 69-64.

 

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Raiders face challenge with Butler road game



Even as a coach, Wright State?s Billy Donlon can tell there are aspects of Butler?s Hinkle Fieldhouse that could benefit a visiting team.

?Their floor has some bounce to it,? Donlon said. ?You have some bounce, have some pop, as opposed to a really hard floor when you land and you can feel it.?

But Wright State?s recent visits to the Indianapolis building ended with thuds. Entering tonight?s road matchup against Butler, WSU has lost eight straight at Hinkle by an average of 13.8 points.
Many of those games have come during Butler?s sometimes-dominating run through the Horizon League that has included winning or sharing five straight regular-season titles and advancing to two consecutive NCAA tournament championship games.
But for the time being, Butler has fallen to the middle of the pack.
On a 3-4 stretch in the past seven games, the Bulldogs (12-11) are tied with Wright State (11-12) and Detroit (12-11) for fifth place in the league at 6-5. They are returning home after four straight road games to an environment that averages a league-best 6,941 in home attendance (2,814 per game better that second-best Wisconsin-Milwaukee).
?But actually,? said WSU sophomore Cole Darling, ?it?s harder to play with less (in attendance). It really is.?
Some opposing arenas are just difficult to visit. From his playing days at North Carolina-Wilmington, Donlon remembers the discomfort of playing at William & Mary, not because of the crowd, but the stifling heat.

WSU junior Julius Mays, who transferred to WSU from North Carolina State, faced some of the country?s most notable college arenas in the Atlantic Coast Conference, but he said his high school experience prepared him.

?A lot of people ask me what it was like playing at Duke, but to me it felt like nothing because I come from Indiana high school basketball, and the crowd being loud to me is nothing,? Mays said.

?Everybody (was) telling me that Cameron Indoor was the loudest gym they?ve ever been in. I walked in, and it wasn?t as loud as I thought it was.?

 

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FEBRUARY SADNESS


Butler has been a perennial participant in March Madness throughout the 2000s, culminating in college basketball's past two national championship games.

This season, the Bulldogs may not even make it to March -- the first round of the Horizon League Tournament is Feb. 28.

The Bulldogs weren't expected to return to the Final Four after losing Shelvin Mack and Matt Howard, but they were picked to finish first in the league. Now they are one game above eighth place. Of course, they were also 6-5 in the league last year before winning 14 in a row.

"To be quite candid, if you look at the two teams, this year and last year, you say which team shouldn't have been 6-5? It was probably last year's team," coach Brad Stevens said. "So maybe the way to look at it is, this team can get better, this team can grow, this team can do a lot of things."

Stevens offers regular reminders of how small the margin of error is. Butler went to back-to-back Final Fours by winning a sequence of close games. Butler "played reasonably well" at Green Bay last year and won 64-62 on Howard's last-second dunk.

"And, oh, by the way, went to the Final Four," Stevens said. "It's hard to win. Hard to go to (the NCAA) Tournament."