Thursday night marked the beginning of the exhibition season for the Harding men’s basketball team, and it was a great start. Matt Hall had 34 points and 11 rebounds in his return to competition, and Cole Kee sank a three at the buzzer to reach the final margin of three points. Neither school has posted the box score online, so I don’t have complete stats, so I only know this from NSU’s press release. The Bisons actually led the game with 4:21 to play, so it was close the whole game.
Playing a close game against NSU is quite an accomplishment, since the Demons are the two-time defending Southland Conference East Division champs and are picked to win it again this season. Last year, NSU won the conference tournament and went on to the NCAAs, where they beat Iowa in the first round and lost by 13 to a great West Virginia team in the second round.
This marks an outstanding start to the exhibition season, which would get even better with a win at Lipscomb next Thursday night. Unfortunately, since the game is on a weeknight, a 2.5 hour drive from here, and it starts at 9PM Eastern, I won’t be able to attend. I’ll post some stats from Thursday’s game once they’re up on someone’s site.
jfwiii.net 
http://www.nsudemons.com/story.asp?ID=2504
71 Total Fouls? That’s absolutely ludicrous… and in an exhibition game no less. Guess the refs wanted the focus of the game on themselves. No way either team could get into a rhythm in that kind of situation.
This game was the most fouls I’ve ever seen in person (OT game too for that matter) and even then it was totally unnecessary. I thought Mike Anderson was going to spontaneously combust after the fourth guy fouled out. http://gofrogs.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/stats/021803aaa.html
Great effort by Harding given the circumstances.
Wow, I didn’t even notice that there were so many fouls. GSC officials are not very good, but at least they tend to keep their whistles in their pockets more often than not. Then again, you really never know what’s going to happen at this level, where a lot of the best players were guys who didn’t make it in D-I because of their attitudes. I think Coach Morgan recruits good guys for HU, but that’s obviously not always the case elsewhere *coughcoughHendersonStatecoughcough*.
I would really love to see the team build on this good showing and beat Lipscomb on Thursday night.