Team to beat

There’s a bullseye on the backs of the Lakehead Thunderwolves jersey this season. 

Not surprisingly every team is gunning for last year’s OUA darlings, who reversed a decade-long losing trend to not only make the playoffs but succeed.

Forward Ryan Thompson, a threat underneath and from beyond the three-point arc, said the Wolves aren’t entering the playoffs as an underdog anymore, not like last season when they roared their way into the Final 8 for the first time since the disco era.

“I think last year people might have underestimated us maybe. But at the start of the year we knew that it would be different. Everybody’s been gunning for us, everybody wants to beat us because we did well last year. So there’s definitely a target on our back,” Thompson said.

No more can the Wolves get away with the underdog role, he added, even though they haven’t necessarily gotten the respect the No. 7-ranked team in the nation typically receives.

“The guys have to come in with the same amount of intensity, regardless,” Thompson said, adding the pressure is there, but not necessarily a bad thing.

“I think it’s self-motivating pressure. Everybody wants to get to nationals. Everyone wants to win, basically.”

Guard Ben Johnson, a Thunderwolves rookie this year who jumped into coach Scott Morrison’s three-guard system, playing a key role down the stretch off the bench, said the team has to take a different type of mentality into this year’s postseason.
 
“I think coach is getting us ready for that. Every day you have to come out and execute because there’s no tomorrow if you lose.”

Though the Wolves ranked sixth of eight teams in scoring in the West, Johnson said it hasn’t mattered all year and it won’t matter in the playoffs as long as one thing is present.

“The one constant you can always rely on is effort, and defence is not so much a skill as an effort. If we come out and just give it our all on defence, shots are going to fall. That’s the focus,” he said.

The Wolves had the second-stingiest defence in the entire league this season, and it’s a trend the team would like to continue in the win-or-go-home scenario that presents itself to them starting on Saturday.

Greg Carter, whose defensive heroics helped spark the Wolves to a pair of home-court, second-half wins over Windsor, said a loss to Western in the season-finale showed them not to take any team for granted – though he admitted they’re not worried about who they’ll play.

The loss was a wake-up call, he said, a lesson learned they won’t soon forget.

“I think it was. It let us all kind of realize that we can be beat and it really made us refocus as we go into this week,” Carter said.

The Wolves will host the OUA quarterfinal match at the Thunderdome on Saturday night. Tip-off is 7 p.m. The winner will advance to the OUA Final Four in Hamilton the following weekend.