Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State coach Scott Nagy isn’t one to check Horizon League scores on game days. Though the Raiders are locked in a duel with Northern Kentucky for the regular-season title, he’s too focused on his team to worry about how the Norse are faring.
“I don’t look because I can’t control that,” he said. “But my assistants do.”
Nagy probably was informed fairly quickly then about the shocking developments in the league Saturday night. NKU had its 20-game home winning streak snapped by lowly Cleveland State, losing 83-77 to a team that was at the bottom of the league standings, ranked 295th in the NET rankings and hadn’t won a road game all season.
That means the Raiders can capture their first outright league title in program history if they win their final two regular-season games at Green Bay on Thursday and Milwaukee on Saturday. A split might even be good enough.
They’re 12-4 in the league while the Norse, who play at Milwaukee on Thursday and Green Bay on Saturday, dropped to 11-5. And the teams appear headed in opposite directions.
The Raiders have solved their depth issue with the emergence of freshman Malachi Smith, giving them a solid eight-man rotation. They’ve won 10 of their last 11 games to improve to 18-11 overall.
“That’s why we didn’t panic early,” Nagy said. “We knew we had the toughest schedule in the league. Obviously, we thought we’d have (injured sophomore wing) Jaylon Hall through that, and it just took us a while to figure out what was best for us.
“We finally got good defensively, which is really what changed for us. And our freshmen have started playing more minutes for us, and that changed things.”
