Finally a signature Valley win but overall Valley play = not good

The Missouri Valley went 4-2 yesterday, and the major thing is that one Valley team finally got a real quality win..
Wichita State beat LSU 70-69 at LSU!
The rest of the numbers look good, but the other wins were over Middle Tennessee State, Idaho State, and Saint Louis.

Wihcita State didn't shoot especially well, but rebounded better than LSU and that combined with poor shooting by LSU was the key.

Evansville beat MTSU by two with Colt Ryan getting 22 pts. One of the announcers doing the Indiana State-Purdue game yesterday was trying to hype the Valley and said Ryan should be the MVC Player of the Year. He had a good performance yesterday - but I am not sure I'd give it to him yet. For almost exactly the same number of shot attempts, Andrew Warren gets 2 points per game more scoring, plus AW has twice the rebounding and more assists.

Indiana State hung with Purdue for 30 minutes, then ran out of gas. Dwayne Lathan looked great at times, but 8 turnovers for a guy not even playing point guard is one of the things that killed them.

Creighton debuted Greg Echenique...and he played 18 minutes, got 12 pts, 5 rebs.
Echenique cut significantly into Kenny Lawson's playing time, and Lawson only had 7 pts, and 2 rebs in his 18 minutes...
Hmm....Lawson is the Preseason Player of the Year in the Valley and everyone says it's his award to lose.
Don't you think dropping Lawson's playing time to just 18 minutes is going to hurt his chances? This will be interesting.

Missouri State went pretty much the whole way with starters (33-38 minutes) and Weems had a 10-14 night with 26 pts. in their win over cold shooting Saint Louis.
The fact that MSU got to the FT line a ton more than SLU and that nobody on SLU had more than 3 or 4 rebounds made a little difference as well.

Drake scored only 19 1st half pts, and lose to Iowa 59-52.

One other interesting game, Ohio played St. Bonaventure to 4 overtimes, but lost 112-107. Point guard DJ Cooper was 17-41 from the floor and scored 43 points, and had 13 assists.
Here's an amazing discrepancy in this game -- Ohio was 40-101....they took an amazing 101 shot attempts!!
St. Bonaventure was 38-67 -- taking 34 fewer shots than Ohio! DJ Cooper alone took MORE shot attempts than four of SBU's starters COMBINED!


Here's the bad news for the Valley...
the MVC's conference RPI ranks them 13th among conferences, trailing even the Ivy League, the Colonial, and even the Horizon!
http://realtimerpi.com/rpi_conf_Men.html

The Valley hasn't been outside the TOP 9 conferences in RPI since 2004, and they haven't been as bad as they are currently since more than a decade.

I think the team that steps up with strong upperclassmen and good play down the stretch will win the Valley.