Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State’s NCAA Tournament hopes went up in Flames on Monday night.
That would be the UIC Flames, who beat the Raiders out 73-56 in a Horizon League tournament semifinal at Indiana Farmers Coliseum.
Wright State dominated the HL regular season for the most part, but the outright champions lost two of three games to the Flames (18-16), who advanced to the championship game with hopes of getting their own surprise Big Dance invite.
The latest loss left Wright State coach Scott Nagy sounding certain his team would not get one despite going 25-7 and boasting a team with a strong inside game (HL Player of the Year Loudon Love), perimeter shooting (Bill Wampler and others) and a senior point guard (Cole Gentry) to run the show.
“Well it’s why we want to get Wright State hopefully to the point — and I would hope everybody else in our league would think this way, too – that we can start getting more than one team in the league (in the NCAA Tournament) and so we can’t have the kind of year that we’ve had and it all comes down to one or two games at the end of the year for you to get where you where you really want to get,” said Nagy, the league’s co-coach of the year.
From the start Monday night, almost nothing went right for the Raiders, who set a program record for regular-season wins in the Division I era and won a program-record 15 conference games.
