Lobos basketball team has fresh players, fairly high expectations
ALBUQUERQUE — Don’t look now, but Lobo basketball season is literally just days away.
The University of New Mexico men’s team opens its season Tuesday night at Cal State-Northridge, the first of 30 regular season games between next week and the middle of March.
What seemed like a traveling band of misfits shrouded in mystery, thrown together at the last minute by a head coach no one knew much about, last year’s team started miserably and wound up winning 19 games and nearly making it to the NCAA Tournament.
Most of that roster is gone, including the glue guy (Joe Furstinger) and unstable leader (Sam Logwood). In their place is a vastly more athletic, much more talented group of proven big men and strong guards. Expectations are as high as they have been in years as the Lobos were picked third in the Mountain West Conference, some going so far as to peg them as an outside threat to unseat mighty Nevada at the top of the league standings.
“To be honest, I’m kind of having to temper the enthusiasm of our team a lot,” Weir said. “We’ve got a lot of highenergy guys and we play a high-energy style, so with that comes fluctuations in attitudes, in emotions, in energy levels.”
An interesting dynamic is starting to take shape. Whereas last year’s group was notoriously thin and undersized in the paint, it forced the Lobos to dictate the pace through a full-court press on defense and a relentless 3-ball barrage on offense. It was all about forcing the tempo and wearing down bigger teams with guard-oriented play.
This year’s team is almost the com-
plete opposite, and it’s something that is forcing Weir to look at things differently.
“There’s some things that maybe last year’s team that we thought were weaknesses that also became our strengths, that now we’re having to counter when we play smaller teams,” he said. “That’s really the challenge that those guys are going to have to start embracing for us to be good at that end of the floor.”
As for the main defensive cog in the middle, UNM is still in a holding pattern on the eligibility of center Carlton Bragg. Weir said the NCAA is targeting next Tuesday as a potential end to the ongoing debate over Bragg’s availability.
A 6-foot-10 junior who began his college career as a blue-chip recruit at Kansas, Bragg sat out last year while attending Arizona State before moving to UNM last February. He has practiced with the team ever since, participating in most team activities despite not actually being acknowledged on the team roster until late last week.
Worst case scenario, Weir said, is Bragg will sit out until the fall semester ends on Dec. 16. Best case, he plays next week against Cal State-Northridge.
In either case, the Lobos appear ready for the next step in the resurrection process Weir started upon his arrival 19 months ago.
Top-secret scrimmage: The Lobos played Northern Arizona in a closed-door scrimmage last weekend and Weir said the results were mixed despite two players not suiting up and a third going down with an injury.
He said he was pleased with a number of things his team did, but putting his players through the paces for the first time against another team was an eye-opener for a number of different combinations off the bench.
“Overall, and I talked to the guys about it [Wednesday], we’ve made a lot of growth and a lot of progress since the season kind of began,” Weir said. “I think it showed in the scrimmage. Our offensive results were very good.”
He said stats and film from the scrimmage will be kept confidential between the coaching staffs.
Infirmary: Weir said point guard Drue Drinnon, a 6-foot freshman from Georgia, went down with an ankle injury against Northern Arizona. He only played about 30 seconds before getting hurt. Weir described it as a “pretty significant strain” and said Drinnon is out indefinitely, meaning at least a week or two.
Senior shooting guard Dane Kuiper is fully recovered from a shoulder injury he suffered in the Cherry & Silver Game, although he did not participate in the NAU scrimmage, nor did Bragg.
Starting 5: The starting lineup for the opener Tuesday has already been decided and, like last year, it’s based on defensive deflections in practices in the days leading up to the game. Exactly who is in that lineup is a secret since Weir flatly declined to reveal his starters for CSUN.