Baru Carries Cougars Past Coker in Sloppy Contest

Final Score: College of Charleston 68, Coker 54
Top Performers:
Adjehi Baru 19 points, 11 rebs, 2 blks
Eren Moses 15 points, 7 rebs

Playing their first game in 12 days, the Cougars looked out of sync for much of a virtual scrimmage against DII Coker. After overcoming another slow start and poor free throw shooting, the size and depth of the Cougars eventually proved too much for the under-manned Cobras as the home team pulled away for a 14 point victory in the 2nd half.

Adjehi Baru was head and shoulders above everyone on the court tonight. Once the Cougars started hitting enough shots to force Coker out of their double and triple teams on Baru, the junior big man went to work on the much smaller Cobra front line and shot 9-12 from the field to come within a point of tying a career high. Since Wojcik came aboard last year the team has preached an inside-out mentality but with the surprise play of Barry and Chealey the team has often initiated offense from the perimeter. That was not the case tonight. Stitt and Chealey were feeding Baru early and often in the shot clock and Baru was effective nearly every time he made his moves. The only thing missing was his free throw shooting. That's a shame because Adjehi has been one of the better free throw shooters on the team this year and if he went more than 1-for-7 tonight he would have easily eclipsed his career scoring mark.

The rest of the team generally looked like a group who had not played in close to 2 weeks. With exams to focus on and the downswing of going from a tough OOC schedule to an exhibition game, a few lapses could probably be expected. While I don't advocate playing Division II schools, I guess it is better to get the kinks out against such an opponent. So long as you are able to put said opponent away. There were careless unforced turnovers, goaltends and miscommunication on offense and the Cougars' unwillingness to close out on Coker's shooters at full speed resulted in a game that was cut to 2-3 points several times in the first half. My hope is that the win will not discourage the coaching staff and players from using this as a learning experience and fixing some of the issues (free throw shooting, over-dribbling, lackadaisical defense) that started to creep back in the losses out in California.

The plus side of tonight was two-fold. Number one: we got to see more minutes out of reserves like Theo, Terrance O'Donohue and JBC. Theo showed off some nice facets of his game that he teased us with in limited minutes last year. In a short stretch he nailed a three-pointer and cut hard to the rim for a very nice jam off the pass from Baru.

But the real spark off the bench tonight was Jonathan Burroughs-Cook. The freshman from Memphis continues to be a fan favorite (maybe just my favorite) and microwave off the pine. He's all over the floor, flying around at 110% effort, every second of time he's on the court. In this game he was the best free throw shooter in a white jersey (instant fan favorite material on a night like tonight), faked out the entire Coker team on a shake and stutter move to the rim for an uncontested layup, drew an and-1 going to the rim yet again and stole the ball on a broken inbounds pass from Coker. My man-crush on Cook is gaining steam as he gets more playing time and I'm totally alright with all of this. #TeamJBC 4 Lyfe.

The second good sign of possible offensive wrinkles to come was that the team looked to push the tempo and run a bit more in this game. Maybe it was the level of competition or the number of blocked shots and steals the Cougars used to jumpstart themselves but the guys definitely made an effort to get out and run in this game. There were moments where the Cougars looked as though they had never practiced such open and variable plays before (the 3-on-1 fastbreak resulting in a Canyon Barry turnover comes to mind) but at least Wojcik showed that he is not bound to the sometimes overly-decisive slow moving sets. The Cougs have the athletes to pad their point totals by getting in transition, the one thing that I'd just like to see them do a bit more is pass ahead to Sitt or Barry on the wings when they're on the break. Too often tonight the Cougars would take off for the other end of the court only to have Chealey or whoever was running point hang on to the ball for too long and waste an opportunity.

All in all tonight went about as I expected. The Cougars avoided the massive letdown of losing to a DII team and had they hit their FT's (again, a gaping weakness of this team) they could have easily walked away with this one with an even larger margin. The defensive lapses need to be cleaned up but as long as we have Baru and Burroughs-Cook everything will be ok.