If you have not yet turned your attention to college basketball season with the football season still going on, you may be missing one of the best starts to a season NDSU basketball has seen in a long time and they are doing it in a style you may not be used to seeing. That style? Fun! Fun and an abundance of 3-pointers.
Since Dave Richman has been the coach at NDSU, the players have come and gone but the style of play for the most part always remained the same, tough defensive basketball with a grind it out offense. With the NIL and portal era, it has become more difficult to build those teams of 4 or 5 year guys in a system who knew how to run it inside and out and could execute it at a high level. It has led to a couple of tough seasons for NDSU that did not end in the manner coach Richman is used to and the need to adapt became relevant.
In comes this year’s team. With 8 new faces in the locker room, including prize transfer and Fargo native Jacksen Moni, the NDSU coaching staff assembled a roster of talented shooters and depth players around the returning players and have adapted the system to fit the guys in the locker room. With all the new faces, there were some early season struggles and while it was evident there was talent on the roster, the team was not executing and after only getting 1 win against a D1 opponent in their first 7 games of the season, it had many wondering, myself included, if this team was going to be able to turn the corner or if we were in for a long season.
A little over a month later and the Bison are absolutely on fire and have won 8 straight games including a win over Big East opponent Butler, Coach Richman’s first power conference win in his tenure, and winning their last two games in absolutely dominant fashion by 36 and 34 points. The most recent of those victories came over Cal State Bakersfield whom NDSU lost to on the road in the 3rd game of the season in a late game collapse. That game was a prime example of just how far this team has come in two short months and while NDSU would love to have that game back as well as the OT loss against Samford where they led by 14 points with only 3 minutes to go, the lessons learned seem to have propelled this team to the run they are on now.
Just what has led to this winning streak you ask, shooting…and shooting well. Heading into Summit League play NDSU ranks #1 in the entire country with 12.8 3-pointers made per game. Not only are they making a high number of 3’s but they are doing so efficiently as they rank 3rd in the country in 3pt% at 41.5%. Pair this with a well rounded offense that moves well and can score in multiple ways with Moni and Feddersen inside and multiple players getting open on cuts to the basket and the results are NDSU also leading the country in Shooting Efficiency with a 1.246 rating and a #2 ranking in Effective FG% at 59.4%. If these numbers sound incredible, it’s because they are and this Bison team is looking dangerous. They are shooting well because they are creating open shots for each other all over the floor in a selfless brand of basketball that is a joy to watch. Pairing these offensive numbers with a consistently improving defense in both effort and execution and the last two Bison opponents have found out just how rough of a night you can have against them.
We now head into the conference season and the games matter that much more and the opponents become more and more familiar. Can NDSU continue this historic run and tear through conference play or will the shooting cool and familiar opponents find ways to slow NDSU down? There’s only one way to find out and that’s to decide it on the court for the next 2 ½ months. If you haven’t seen this team play this year, do yourself a favor and get to the SHAC to watch, as I mentioned at the beginning…it’ll be fun!