Rolling his eyes toward the Burton Coliseum ceiling prior to practice Wednesday afternoon, Lance Potier concedes that, last Thursday, he met his match.
The versatile, 6-foot-6 guard whose cemented a role in coach Dave Simmons’ starting lineup purely for his tenacious defense has one duty each time McNeese State takes the court — smothering the opponent’s best player.
“Best player, hands down, is Dennis Smith,” Potier says of defending North Carolina State’s ballyhooed freshman point guard who had 23 points on 9-of-12 shooting in the Wolfpack’s 87-59 win against the Cowboys.
Pundits peg Smith a lottery pick in this June’s NBA Draft. Potier, a senior, is a veteran of drawing such arduous assignments when the Cowboys travel for their pre-conference slate of guarantee games against blueblood schools with more amenities and prestige than the Cowboys can even fathom.
“I had (former Oklahoma guard Buddy) Hield,” Potier says, recalling last season’s 85-56 loss against the country’s eventual No. 1 team. “And (Smith) was a tougher matchup.”
The beginning of Southland Conference on Saturday play eases Potier’s nightly assignment, if only slightly. He’s been with the program for long enough and is cognizant of the necessity, and sometimes inevitability, of these guarantee games.
Prior to McNeese’s 70-63 win against Tulane on Dec. 20, the program had not won a guarantee game or a game against a non-conference, Division I school since 2014 — a span of eight games against teams like LSU, UCLA, Indiana and Baylor.
This year’s gauntlet was especially daunting. Using RPI rankings as of Dec. 27, McNeese’s five guarantee game opponents — Tulane, SMU, Memphis, NC State and Purdue — have an average ranking of No. 118.
Tulane, at No. 340, plummets that average. Still, the Cowboys faced SMU (No. 32), NC State (No. 38) and Purdue (No. 46). McNeese lost to all three of those teams by 32 or more.
“We’ve always taken the approach of a tough preseason, nonconference schedule in hopes that it can help us prepare for conference. We took our lumps in this one,” Simmons said. “But it gave us some experience, we played in some tough, tough places. I don’t think it’s going to get any tougher than the venues we played in or the kind of people we played. Hopefully we can put that behind us and look at the payoff — we’ve been there, done that.”
A logical question, though, can be asked of McNeese’s mindset in these games. Players, though they are hesitant to admit it, are cognizant of the talent and size disparity prior to lacing up. The four losses were by an average of 37 points and, in all four cases, the game was ostensibly decided at halftime.
What, if anything, can be gleaned from such a situation?
“A lot,” says forward Stephen Ugochukwu, who missed four nonconference games with a pulled hamstring. “We can learn a lot defensively because they have some good players. We can learn to defend better and to be more patient, to run our offense and just the toughness. A lot of those schools have bigger players and more athletic players, so it really teaches us to play fearless, strong and competitive.”
Expanding the averages to include all Division I, non-conference opponents, McNeese’s schedule was the third-toughest in the Southland Conference, trailing only Houston Baptist and Nicholls State. Those rankings were reflective of games through Dec. 25.
The Cowboys won just one game against a Division I opponent, that aforementioned victory against the Green Wave, and lost for a second straight season to Division III Louisiana College.
They sit 3-8 — the conference’s second-worst record — and have glaring defensive issues, allowing teams to score 85 points a game and outrebound them by an average of 12.3.
“Obviously in the Southland Conference we should be better on the rebounding end of it because everyone should be a similar size,” Simmons said. “We look forward to that and, obviously, there won’t be any first-round NBA players in our league. Hopefully there’s not”
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