odds show NIU as 8 point favorites. tough matchup for us, unless we are on fire from the field (and free throw line!!!)

1 pt game at the half

35-34 NIU at the half. Mooney just missed a wild half court shot at the buzzer. The Ags have done a good job of controlling the pace and taking their time on offense. NIU hasn't been able to get out an run as much as they would like. Ags shooting 43% and NIU is shooting 50% but the Huskies are beating the Ags on the boards 21-11.

Good contributions from the Aggie bench: Squire has 6 and Mooney has 9 with two other 3's just rimming out. We need some offensive help from AJ and Siler in the second half. They both were missing badly in the first half.

Hope the Ags can hang in there and squeeze out a nice road win.

Go Ags!

52-44 niu. Ags shots not dropping.

Shot in the mid 30’s. Not sure what we were in the first half, but it was pretty bad in the second. Hard to win when two of your top (expected) scorers go 3-20! Yikes

Sure would be nice to play a full 40 minutes

3-20 from AJ and Siler pretty much sums the problems this team continues to have scoring. We played decent defense and held their leading scorer to 10 points under his average and held the Huskies to 13 points under their average but we went over 7 minutes at one point in the second half without scoring.

The thing is, we returned most of our scoring from last season. As a team last year we shot 47% from the field. This year we are shooting 38% overall. Last year we shot 37% from 3. This year we are shooting 28%. TJ has been the only fairly consistent scorer on the team this season.

We had plenty of open looks tonight and were missing badly...airballs and offline clunkers that barely drew iron. The drop-off from in scoring from last year is shocking.

Last year we averaged 72.3 ppg and this year we are only scoring 58 ppg. It's going to be very hard to keep teams below 58 points to have a chance to win.

Les believes first and foremost that defense wins games but the ball has to go through the hoop with some consistency also and, so far this season, that has not been happening.

On the bright side, Damion Squire had 9 points in 11 minutes. Maybe he’s earned a little more PT.

Agree. When Siler is ice cold, why not?

I was thinking about the shooting : if the other three starters went 16-20 from the field we STILL would have been below 50%. That’s a lot trips (17) down the court without a bucket

Defense looked solid, but TJ's going to need some help on the offensive end. Despite our record, I still believe this team has potential to be a BW contender. Freshman Caleb Fuller is going to be a solid contributor. He made a couple mistakes down the stretch including a travel and double dribble, but he already looks like he belongs and has good size. Only going to improve. Overall, shots were not falling, and in some cases didn't even look close. We'll need our vets to step up. A starting 5 of BW POY Shorts, Siler, John, Goode and Fuller should not be 2-7.

No Gonzalez last night. Was that mentioned in the broadcast?

You're right, that didn't even occur to me. Plus I think Cameron Ba was dressed (but of course didn't play). I didn't hear the announcers mention Gonzalez. They were pretty much focused on the NIU team, with a little TJ praise thrown in there every once in a while.

i was listening off and on to the radio broadcast, and following via Live Stats. Didn't hear anything from Scott Marsh when I was listening, but i didn't turn on the broadcast until late first half.

They have 11 days off for finals, so hopefully whatever kept him off the court is done by then. Squire certainly showed some promise last night in minutes that normally would have gone to Gonzalez. It would be nice to get all this parts firing at the same time so we could actually put a full game together.

Anything can and usually does happen in the wild, wild Big West but, unless we make some dramatic improvement on offense especially, we will be in the middle of the pack at best.

Irvine and Santa Barbara are both very solid. Irvine is disciplined and deep and Santa Barbara has been winning without their top scorer, Max Heidegger, who has been out all season from a concussion. UCSB,s coach, Joe Pasternack, has gone out and brought in several 3 and 4 star recruits and transfers in just two years at the helm.

Fullerton has been a mixed bag up to this point but they have 3 terrific scorers in Allman, Ahmad and Rowe. Any of those 3 could play in the PAC12. Long Beach always has a lot of very athletic players and may be in the mix also and the same is true of Hawai'i and both of those programs usually have several PAC12 caliber players on the roster.

We've got a lot of catching up to do at the moment.