No rest for the weary

Vernon Teel had a quiet 20 points in Thursday's win over Irvine | Courtesy of Facebook

The Lions WCC schedule starts off with a bang, as LMU will face St. Mary's, Gonzaga and Portland (the conference's three best teams so far this season) in three of its first four games of 2011. With the way the Lions have been playing recently, it looks like they will begin conference play 1-3 if they don't turn things around quickly.

In the Lions victory over UC Irvine last Thursday, we fans saw more of the same lackluster play that we've seen all season long. After playing a decent first half, in which the Lions earned an eight-points lead while holding the Anteater shooters to just 38 percent overall and 21 percent from beyond the arc, LMU fans again saw a confusing Lions team in the second period.

At first, it looked like the Lions were poised to play their best half of basketball on the season. In less than six minutes, LMU pushed their eight-point lead to 19, and was moving the ball extremely well on offense.Things seemed to be clicking, but as soon as I looked down at my phone and read a text from my friend that said "Why do we look so great this half ... I'm getting too excited for conference play now," it seemed that the Lions self-destructed once again. In less than five minutes the 19-point lead was back down to eight, and then to make things worse, with just under five minutes left in the contest LMU and Irvine were locked in a close four-point game.

I give the Lions, and especially Anthony Ireland's free throw shooting, credit for pulling out the victory down the stretch, but it worries me that the game even had to get to that point. If we are fortunate enough to build a large lead against a team like St. Mary's, and then happened to let it slip down to four, there is little chance we would have been able to still pull out the win. This is actually nothing new this season, but our attitude and the way we play with a lead needs to change for us to do well in WCC play.

The first thing that fell apart when we had a large lead was our offense. I know a lot of teams like to begin to run out the clock in the second period when they hold a significant advantage, but that just doesn't seem to work for us. There were too many empty possessions midway through the second half, possessions where the Lions let the shot-clock dwindle down before being forced to take an awful shot. Whatever we were doing to get the 19 points lead was working; I would have liked to see those same offensive sets continue, even with the big lead. It's not like our offense in general couldn't use the practice ...

Thursday the Lions will host a tough St. Mary's team who has begun the season 12-2. They shoot threes well and play tough defense. If the LMU team who seems to have an inability to play a full 40-minutes of solid basketball shows up to Gersten, they will get blown out by twenty points, at least.

But, and you can call me an optimist, I will not give up hope of a victory this Thursday. For starters, we finally saw the Drew Viney Lions fans know and love last week, as he put in 22 points on 7-10 shooting (although it should be noted that if Viney is on, and making 70 percent of his shots, he should have shot at least 17 times. Just saying). Viney's "pump fake - step left - shoot" move was working to perfection, so well in fact that Vernon Teel borrowed it to knock down a long two just as the shot clock was expiring late in the second half. If Viney's outside game, which I critiqued for not being on point this season just last week, is working like it did against Irvine, he can be the type of player to change the outcome of Thursday's game, as long as other people fill in their roles adequately.

Thursday's game tips off at 6 p.m., and can be seen live on ESPNU. Hope to, however, see many of you at Gersten. Go Lions.