Facing Akron and squaring up with forward Demetrius Treadwell was a task Maurice Ndour was looking forward to during the spring of 2013.
“I haven’t seen an Ohio guy that makes him work,” Ndour said in March. “He’s going to have a hard time guarding me. I’m not going to say it’ll be easy for me or him.”
Both Treadwell and Ndour appeared to hold serve on the score sheet in Akron’s 83-80 double overtime win at The Convocation Center on Sunday. Ndour scored a game-high 25 points, while his adversary tallied 16 points and half as many rebounds.
Treadwell’s points didn’t come easily, being that he shot seven of 19 from the field. That’s a pedestrian 36.3 shooting percentage and seven percent below his season average.
And when Ohio redshirt senior forward Jon Smith was given the task of defending the Akron forward, he sent four of Treadwell’s shots back in his face.
“(Smith) has great timing on rotating over and getting a piece of the ball,” Ohio coach Jim Christian said. “He’s a good one-on-one defender. He’s been a great defender all year, so it was nothing different (Sunday).”
Smith finished with eight blocks — the highest total an Ohio player has recorded since 2001 — three steals and seven rebounds, establishing a presence inside that Akron coach Keith Dambrot said he wasn’t accustomed to when playing Ohio in the past.
“It was hard, man,” Dambrot said. “I thought Zeke Marshall was in the game (for Ohio) for a minute. They blocked so many shots. They’re long — they’re a lot different than they used to be. Those other guys, (Reggie) Keely and Ivo (Baltic), they were good players, man, but these guys are long, athletic guys. I mean they’re hard to deal with.”
But where Treadwell killed Ohio was on the offensive glass, where he grabbed a game-high five offensive rebounds and contributed to Akron’s 45-33 advantage on the glass.
Of Akron’s 17 offensive rebounds, eight resulted in an ensuing basket, including four second-chance baskets in the second overtime period.
Ndour noted that he and his teammates did a poor job rebounding the basketball and said that Akron “was tougher than us.”
Christian downplayed Akron’s offensive rebounding success and said that its superiority on the glass is something it has done well all season.
“I mean, they rebound 40 percent of their missed shots, so it’s not like they broke this out of the closet today,” Christian said.
Akron’s 13.7 offensive boards per game and offensive rebound percentage of 38.5 rank second in the Mid-American Conference.
Ultimately, Christian said it was the Bobcats’ inability to prevent the Zips from getting to the rim when they needed to that doomed his squad.
“When we had the lead, we allowed them to get right to the front of the rim,” he said. “Whether it was a deep post-up or a one-on-one drive by (Quincy) Diggs, we needed to get one toughness stop in one of those possessions to ice the game. And we didn’t do that. We kept giving them life.”
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Note: This article appeared in print under "Bobcats lose to Zips"
