Xavier vs. Mount St. Mary’s: Preview, Keys to the Game

November is here and with it is the return of College Basketball and the four month prelude to the greatest sporting event of the year. Xavier returns very little from a team that endeared and entertained but did not achieve all that much in year one under Richard Pitino, but the transfer portal has been good to the Musketeers and there is hope, bordering on expectation, that this group can get back to the top half of the Big East and in the mix for the NCAA Tournament. The first outing comes against a Mount St. Mary’s team that has found their way into the First Four four times since 2014 and is coming off a 6th place finish in the final season the MAAC called itself the MAAC.

Team Fingerprint

The Mountaineers are led by third year coach Donny Lind, who took them to the tournament in year one, knocking off American before falling on the wrong side of a 44 point margin against Duke. His teams tend to hang their hat on the defensive end, with their basic strategy being to make life as difficult as possible inside the arc and dare teams to shoot over them. Opponents have shot 45% of their attempts from deep in both of Lind’s seasons and only hit at a 32% rate which, when coupled with Mountaineers holding opponents to 46% from inside the arc, gave them a top 25 EFG defense in the country last season. How you end up taking a defense that makes life that tough for opponents and turn it into 6th place in the MAAC is a multifaceted process. First, the Mountaineers put their opponents on the line an above average but not extraordinary amount and they almost never turned opponents over. Their rebounding was decent at both ends, but they set themselves up to lose the freebie battle pretty much every night out. That flows right into the other part of the problem: their offense was really bad. The glaring problem in both previous seasons under Lind has been turnovers. They turned the ball over on 21.5% of their possessions his first season and then somehow got worse last year, ending…

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Publish date : 2026-11-02 16:50:00

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