Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State coach Scott Nagy worries before every game. Most coaches do. Even when his team was getting ready to face Northwestern Ohio from the NAIA ranks, he expressed concern, saying, “I view every opponent as a threat.”
That’s why he’s going into the Horizon League tourney with some trepidation. The Raiders are the top seed, but he realizes that’s no guarantee of success.
“It’s hard for any team to win three games (in a row),” he said.
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A new Horizon League format this year will help — the top four seeds have home games instead of holding the entire tourney at a neutral site — but that’s little comfort to Nagy.
“This league was incredibly tight this year, and everyone knows (seeds) eight through one are very close,” he said. “I think the fact that we won it last year should help our guys. But the last two years since I’ve been here, the No. 1 seed hasn’t won it.”
The top seed has emerged victorious only three times in the last 10 seasons. The last to do it was Valparaiso in 2015 when the semifinals and finals were held on Valpo’s home floor.
“We (coaches) talked about this earlier: I didn’t think the top of the league would be quite as good as it was last year, but the middle of the league would be way better, and that proved to be true,” Nagy said.
The Raiders, though, are the hottest team in the field going into their opener at 8 p.m. Tuesday against eighth-seeded IUPUI. They’ve won 11 of their last 13 league games, which also coincides with the emergence of freshman sub Malachi Smith.
