Red Wolves have backcourt options

JONESBORO - Trey Finn and Ed Townsel still talk about how last season ended for Arkansas State’s basketball team.

The Red Wolves put together a late-season run in which they won seven of eight games to snag the Sun Belt Conference West Division title, then lost three of their final four and were knocked out in the semifinals of the Sun Belt Tournament.

The cause of the late swoon was easily identified. A team full of streaky shooters went cold at the same time.

“Man, if we could have hit some shots in that Western game, we had a chance at being in the NCAA Tournament,” Townsel said.

ASU shot 36.7 percent in its Sun Belt Tournament loss to Western Kentucky, more than four percentage points below its season average, and 35 percent over its final four games.

It was enough to abruptly end a season that at one point looked to be turning into one of Coach John Brady’s best at ASU.

Finn won’t be around to help ASU this season, having exhausted his eligibility before becoming a student assistant in the team’s video department. But Townsel is back, and he’s joined by a group of guards that Brady said could be the deepest he’s had in his six seasons in Jonesboro.

Townsel, Brady said, will play shooting guard and point guard, returning to a spot he played as a freshman and a sophomore. The senior will split time with junior Rakeem Dickerson, who shared point guard duties with Cameron Golden last year. Golden has moved over to shooting guard.

Senior transfers Brandon Reed and Melvin Johnson will man the wings.

Altogether, Brady expects it to be a group that can make up for a bit of inexperience in the post after losing All-Sun Belt forward Brandon Peterson.

“I think this is a better shooting team. I think this team can score it better,” Brady said. “We’re better simply with the addition of Brandon Reed and Melvin Johnson.”

Reed averaged 16.8 points in Sun Belt games and was the league’s freshman of the year in 2010. He transferred to Georgia Tech, citing a desire to be closer to his hometown of Powder River, Ga., and spent the next two seasons as a part-time contributor.

He took advantage of the NCAA’s graduate transfer rule this summer to return to Jonesboro for his final season. Brady said he expects to rely on Reed’s scoring ability and experience for more than 30 minutes per game, but both said fans might see a different player than the one they saw three years ago.

“I feel I’m a more mature player, and I have to pick my spots here and there knowing when to score and when to pass,” Reed said. “But when the game is on the line, I’m going to want the ball. That’s just my nature.”

He might not need to score as much considering the players around him.

Townsel averaged 13.1 points per game last season, while Dickerson and Golden combined to average 12.3. Johnson, a senior who sat out last year after transferring from Texas-San Antonio, averaged 13.0 points per game as a junior for the Road Runners.

All of that experience and an exhibition trip to Canada in August have allowed Brady to speed up his practice schedules, too. In past years, he has relied on individual workouts in early practices. This year there has been little of that as the team has spent much of its practices in live scrimmages.

That doesn’t work for some teams, Brady said, but it’s worked just fine for the Red Wolves.

“The teams that I’ve coached that have a little more talent than others, you really have to keep them busy,” Brady said. “They want to play. They want to be competitive. They want to do something every day.

“I think this team knows that they have some talent on it. How we take care of that and what we do to preserve it is up to us.”

Sports, Pages 25 on 10/24/2013

Upcoming Events