Second-year head coach Craig Neal said the team will not prepare for the Princeton offense any differently this time around. The Lobos have always prepared for the offense as a whole rather than for any personnel.
“I think you prepare for their system more than you prepare for individual players so we’ll try to prepare for that,” Neal said. “It’s not easy to get ready for them; it’s not an easy place to play. It’s a hard style to prepare for, they grind it out and they use the clock, they make you play deep into possessions.”
The Falcons will return senior guard Max Yon for the first time since Jan. 10 when Air Force lost to Colorado State 87-92. He left the team after the game for an “undisclosed personal matter,” according to the team.
Yon is averaging 15.3 points per game through his 15 games played this season.
“I think they’ve got one of the better players back in the league with Max Yon,” Neal said. “I don’t know how much he’ll play but he was reinstated for practice (Monday), so that gives them definitely one of the top 15 players in our league back.”
The Lobos headed up north for Colorado Springs early Tuesday morning and had their usual afternoon practice in preparation for Wednesday’s game. For one of the first times this year, the Lobos do not have any injuries or illnesses entering the game.
Neal said he was pleased with his team’s performance against the Princeton offense the first meeting this season but wants to see more out of his young guys who had never faced that type of offense before.
“They didn’t do very well because we had to go zone the whole game. We played three possessions of man,” Neal said. “I think we’ll try to play some man. It’s not a fun offense to guard but we did pretty well.”
He said playing a zone eliminates a lot of the back cutting and screening that the Princeton offense is known for.
“The bottom line is these guys have never seen that,” Neal said. “I don’t know of any high school teams that run the Princeton offense.”
The Lobos (14-7, 6-3 Mountain West) held the Falcons (9-12, 2-8 MW) to 48 points in their last meeting at WisePies Arena while forcing them to shoot only 27.3 percent from behind the 3-point arc and 34.8 percent from the floor.
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Freshman guard Sam Logwood led all scorers that game with a career-high 17 points, three assists and three rebounds.
The last time the Lobos traveled to Colorado Springs to face the Falcons, they lost on a 3-point basket with two seconds remaining in the game to give the Falcons an 89-88 win over the Lobos.
Kyle Tomasi is a sports reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at sports@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @KyTo22.
