Monday Wrap-up

Evening folks. Lots of stuff to talk about, so let's get down to business and spare the niceties.



I want to thank our faithful contributor Amanda for pointing me to this past week's edition of the Jeff Jones Radio Show. In it, we get this tidbit about why Blake Jolivette may no longer be playing. We had gotten this from our sources a week to ten days ago, but it's nice to hear it from JJ's mouth. Certainly he doesn't name Blake directly, but if you have any ability whatsoever to read between the lines, it's right there.

Host (Dan Laing): You talk about experience and growth, one guy that seems to be getting a lot more playing time the past three games or so is Steve Luptak...what have you seen from him over the past three weeks or so, the past month or so that have sort of boosted his playing time.

JJ: [After the Lehigh game]...basically I just said to myself and ultimately to the team, okay I'm going to play the guys that do the things that I say we need to do. I'm going to play the guys that are at least trying to do them the way that we say they need to be done. We had too many people just going out there and doing their own thing and not necessarily in a selfish way, but just kind of "we can do this"...We've got to work on an awful lot and the bottom line for these young guys and for this team and this inexperience is they need to listen, and they need to be able to learn and do things the way we need them to do it or else we're not going to be successful...[Luptak does things the way we need them to be done, and that's why he's getting more playing time.]

So that's that.

Onto happier news, Vlad the Impaler picked up his second Patriot League Player of the Week Award! Here's the citation for it:

Moldoveanu earned his second Patriot League/Anaconda Player of the Week award of the season after putting up 20-point efforts in each of American's contests last week. He totaled 22 points on 9-of-16 shooting in a loss at Army on Wednesday, then contributed an outstanding overall effort in a 71-64 win over Holy Cross on Saturday. Moldoveanu scored 20 points against the Crusaders while also pulling down eight rebounds and dishing out a career-high five assists. He led all scorers in each of the games, and averaged 21.0 ppg, 6.0 rpg and 3.0 apg while shooting 51.7 percent (15-of-29) from the field. Moldoveanu is averaging a team-high 18.6 points per game in 11 contests after becoming eligible at the conclusion of the fall semester. In Patriot League play, he places fourth with 20.2 points per game and second with 8.6 rebounds per contest.

Very nice, way to go Vlad! Keep on impaling!

Other Patriot League news. Yahoo! Sports released their first NCAA bracket this morning (I didn't bookmark and I can't find it now, which is annoying) but they have Lafayette representing the Patriot League as a 16 seed going up against Kentucky in the South bracket. Buzzsaw blowouts anyone? Woo boy.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo! Sports woefully entertaining team report for us from last week here. Goooood times from people who put together their report in 5 minutes and don't bother to proof it at all. Unlike this blog which never makes any errors, factual, grammatical, or otherwise.

Here's some other news for PL Check-In courtesy of the Patriot League:

Five of the remaining six Patriot League teams are within two games of the co-leaders after Saturday's contests which saw plenty of drama. Navy trailed Army by 14 early in the second half before putting together a 33-7 stretch to take control and a 62-56 victory at home. Bucknell rallied from 13 down, scoring the final five points of the game to notch a victory at Colgate, 62-61. American broke open a tie game early in the second half and held on to defeat Holy Cross, 71-64, in Washington, D.C. for Head Coach Jeff Jones' 300th career victory. After Lehigh and Lafayette, Navy is at 3-2 and Army, Bucknell, American and Holy Cross are all 2-3, with Colgate at 1-4.

Home squads won three of four games on Saturday, and the host has now claimed seven of the last eight League contests for a 14-6 record in League play. Lehigh is up to 9-1 at home, while Army and Lafayette are 8-1 and Navy improved to 7-3. Patriot League teams are 45-26 at home this season and 24-64 at road or neutral sites.

(end PL.org content)


Lehigh and Lafayette continue to be the cream of the crop in the PL. Lafayette is led by a trio of talented sophomores while Lehigh is anchored by runaway rookie of the year C.J. McCollum, pre-season player of the year Marquis Hall, and pre-season 1st team all-PL forward Zahir Carrington, who is finally playing up to his ability much to the chagrin of the rest of the PL.

Chris Harris at Navy lost his frontcourt partner in Kaleo Kina to graduation but then Harris decided he'd just double his output to make up for the loss. The guy shoots lights out. He put up 30 points in 21 minutes against Army on Saturday. That is. Unbelievable. I hope we can keep him quiet on Wednesday like we did (relatively) to Kyle Roemer from Colgate.

I think that's enough for tonight. We'll have a Navy preview and Speculation Tuesday tomorrow. What would you like to see me speculate about?

Pro deo et patria and GO EAGLES!