By Joe Scalzo
scalzo@vindy.com
YOUNGSTOWN
The Youngstown State men’s basketball team needs a better backup plan.
After entering the season as the team’s biggest question mark, the Penguin bench has not lived up to even modest expectations, something that grew more obvious in last week’s road losses to Valparaiso (76-62) and Butler (71-55).
The Penguin reserves did not score a point in the loss to Valparaiso and had just four against Butler.
For the season, YSU’s bench is averaging just 8.8 points per game — 13 percent of the Penguins’ 66.5 points per game — and no reserve is averaging more than Nate Perry’s 2.2 points per game.
“Disappointing,” said YSU coach Jerry Slocum. “I’m not surprised by ... the fact that we’re up and down because young guys are up and down.
“Shawn [Amiker] and Nate and Josh [Chojnacki] and Fletch [Larson] they go some games where they’ve really helped you and they looked really intense and they were ready to play. And this trip, we didn’t get as much production as we needed to.”
All of YSU’s reserves are either freshmen or sophomores, due in part to the fact that YSU lost two juniors after last season.
Forward Tre Brewer (who played in all but one of YSU’s games last fall before transferring to Cal State San Bernardino) and guard Devonte Maymon (who appeared in 20 games before transferring to Kentucky Wesleyan) would have given the Penguins more depth and experience.
Add in freshman guard Sheldon Brogdon, who left last year’s team after four games, and it’s easy to see how YSU got so young, so fast.
“I really don’t want to comment on that,” Slocum said of the departures. “A lot of times it’s addition by subtraction. We want guys who want to be here.”
Maymon, incidentally, is no longer on Kentucky Wesleyan’s roster after playing seven games for the Division II program and Brogdon never appeared on Walsh University’s roster after announcing he would transfer to the NAIA program. Brewer is still at CSUSB and is the Division II team’s second-leading scorer at 12.5 points per game.
While some of YSU’s poor bench production can be explained by a lack of playing time — Chojnacki leads the reserves with just 9.5 minutes per game — Slocum has repeatedly said those backups need to show they deserve more minutes, both in practice and in games.
“They know they’ve been inconsistent,” Slocum said. “We need to keep going to them and having faith in them and get them those early minutes in games is really crucial for me so they can get their feet wet and get some confidence.”
In fact, the whole team could probably use a confidence boost after what Slocum called “our worst effort of the year.”
“We played very poorly,” he said. “We did not match the intensity that came at us.”
