A recurring theme in SFU athletics is that of a team steadily working to become championship contenders, after having to rebuild for the NCAA; the men’s basketball team can be counted among them.
However, according to head coach James Blake, they are not looking to recapture past glory, as many other SFU teams are, but are looking towards new territory — simply to make the playoffs.
“Our journey has been different than [that of] a lot of teams at Simon Fraser; we’re a program that in 50 years has never won a conference title,” explained Blake. “So our goals are maybe not that of the swimming team that has won national titles, or of the softball team that has won national titles, our goal is to get to that conference tournament.”
The coach notes that this is not a fast process, and must be approached with patience: “What people do a lot of the time is skip steps, and we really haven’t skipped steps. We take little steps and make sure we’re competing, and evaluating our talent properly in the offseason.”
Those steps include recruiting, especially as the team only has three returning seniors this year. Blake hopes to continue to develop the Clan’s offensive game, having been outscored on average by 2.3 points per game last year.
“We [want] to bring in other players who are able to close that gap, that point differential, we had two losses last year by one point,” he said, referring to losses to Western Washington University and University of Alaska-Anchorage, who were first and second in the conference. “We’re right there, we’re two points away, and this year’s job is to close that gap.
“The emphasis in recruiting this year was that we need to shoot the ball a little bit better from the perimeter, we’re really going to speed the game up, shoot more three point shots, spread the game out even more.”
Returning seniors and team captains Sango Niang and Justin Cole will help drive this offensive shift. Niang led the team in scoring with 392 points last season, averaging 16.3 points per game, while Cole led the team in both field goals attempted and made, making 135 out of 279 attempts.
“Their primary roles this year as seniors are to be leaders, as captains, not only in scoring, but [. . .] they’ve got to do all the things in practice, in the weight room. They need to show they can [. . .] lead this young team to where we need to be, to get to that next level,” said Blake.
Rounding out the team is a sizable number of freshmen and sophomores, making for a notably younger team than last year. Joining them are a number of Division I transfers, including Hidde Vos and Michael Harper.
The team will look to improve on their conference record, in which they went 3-15 last season. Despite the low number of conference wins, they performed well outside of conference, losing only one non-conference game, excluding their exhibition games against Division I teams.
