Men's Basketball
Home Team: Wright State Raiders
Visiting Team: Butler Bulldogs
Venue: Nutter Center (Dayton, Ohio)
Game Time: 7:00 p.m.
Fellow Attendee: Brandi
Game Photos
I hate missing BGSU men's basketball games at Anderson Arena, as I did on Saturday--indeed, it was only the third home game I've missed in ten years. However, Brandi and I were out of town, and getting back to BG in time for the game, while possible, would have been problematic. And we had decided to go to Dayton for the Butler-Wright State game instead, as I'm a former student of WSU as well, and it's not every day that you get an opportunity to see a top-ten team in action. Still, that made me feel only slightly better about missing a game at Anderson, despite the fact that the Falcons dropped a heartbreaker, 65-63 to Eastern Michigan.
The game at the Nutter Center was announced as a sellout (attendance was 10,827), the first for basketball in the 17-year history of the arena. I don't know how true that is--while there weren't a ton of empty seats, there weren't so few that you couldn't find them if you looked, and it seems to me that they could have packed some more people in the arena if they had wanted to. Still, it was a good crowd, especially for a team that rarely fills the arena to even half its capacity. The Falcon fan in me insists on noting, of course, that even with well over twice the capacity, the Nutter Center at its craziest can't come close to equaling the sheer volume of Anderson Arena at a similar frenzy.
That, however, is neither here nor there, and it was a fun game to attend. I have to be honest: I didn't expect Wright State to win, or even to keep the game particularly close. I knew they had gotten a good one when they hired first-year coach Brad Brownell, but I was surprised by how well the Raiders played. DaShaun Wood (a strong candidate for Horizon League Player of the Year) led them with 30 points, but they had a balanced attack in which no player looked reluctant to take a shot, and it worked very well for them. They also played well on defense, holding Butler's leading scorer A.J. Graves (another candidate for the league's Player of the Year) to just 10 points. They're a fun team to watch, and if Coach Brownell sticks around for a while, he'll develop them into a perennial contender for league championships.
