Edna Stewart
March 15, 2011
Is Our Seafood Safe?
March 17, 2011
In the end, the numbers game just proved to be too much for the Nicholls State men’s basketball team.
After losing their second leading scorer and leading rebounder junior Fred Hunter to a torn ACL in early February, the Colonels scratched and clawed their way into the Southland Conference Tournament as the No. 8 and final seed.
Once there, the talent gap with Hunter unavailable was just too much to overcome as guts, grit, heart and hustle weren’t enough for Nicholls to overcome No. 1 seed and regular season champion McNeese State last Wednesday, falling to the Cowboys 61-54 in the opening round of the conference tournament.
“I’m just extremely proud of our guys, how hard they competed and how well they represented our university,” Colonels coach J.P. Piper said.
The pride Piper experienced in defeat is likely because of how dramatic Hunter’s loss was to the Colonels’ lineup and how the team rallied amongst one another in his absence.
When the 6-foot-5-inch standout blew out his knee preparing for a game in practice, Nicholls was 5-4 in conference play and had high hopes to be one of the teams to beat in the run for the league’s only NCAA Tournament spot.
The forward’s 240 pounds of brute force proved hard to replace in the paint, as Nicholls got outrebounded and ultimately outscored in each of its next two games to drop the team below .500 in the standings, thus putting the team’s position in the conference tournament in serious doubt.
“It’s devastating,” Piper said in February. “I struggled to not break down, really. When he left the floor and the trainer came back and reported back to me what he suspected, then they let him sit for 30 minutes and tested his knee again and the trainer comes to you and tells you, ‘Look, Coach, it’s torn,’ … breaking that news to the team was hard. I was choked up.”
From adversity came unity as the outmatched and shorthanded Colonels recovered and grinded out wins in three of their five regular season games to clinch the meeting with McNeese, which ended the team’s season.
Against the Cowboys, the matchup was a virtual microcosm of the entire conference slate, as the Colonels started smoothly and took just a three-point deficit into halftime.
But the depth chart eventually stacked against Nicholls, as the Cowboys went up by 16 points in the second half.
Nicholls fought within three late in the half, but could never pull even against the regular season champs, eventually succumbing to the game clock.
Senior forward Anatoly Bose led the Colonels with 25 points in the loss, despite seeing sometimes two and three Cowboys defenders nipping at his heels – a strategy he’s seen all season.
“If you can make Bose spend a lot of energy on the defensive end, he may miss some free throws or a couple of jumpers, but I can tell you right now, we didn’t do a good enough job of doing that,” McNeese State coach Dave Simmons said. “Bose still played very well. He had some big buckets and put backs. He kept them in the game – he’s just a tough guy.”
The strong effort closes Bose’s career with 2,040 total points – third in school history.
But the eight other Colonels who received playing time scored just 29 points combined and shot a collective 11-for-32 from the field, which proved to be no match for McNeese who had four players in double figures.
Bose said despite his statistical success, he shoulders some blame in the defeat.
“I wasn’t too surprised by the attention I got,” Bose said. “I’ve had four years here and teams have tried to do a lot of different things to try to slow me down. I never really could get in a rhythm. They did a really good job defending.”
With Hunter in the lineup, maybe the outcome would have been a little different.
Either way, Piper knows one thing – his team has no reason to hang its head in defeat.
The numbers were just a little bit too much for the Colonels to overcome this time around.
“A few weeks back when Fred went down, we really came together and we took the No. 1 team in this league down to the wire and I couldn’t be more proud of our guys,” Piper said. “Obviously we wanted to win the game, but we tip our hats to McNeese, that’s a great ballclub.”
Nicholls State senior forward Anatoly Bose makes a pass during a game last season. Bose’s storied Nicholls career ended last Wednesday when the Colonels fell to McNeese State in the Southland Conference Tournament. NICHOLLS STATE ATHLETICS
