City of Basketball Love

Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2017-18 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 10. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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Lehigh’s last Patriot League title and NCAA appearance came in 2012, when current Portland Trail Blazers guard C.J. McCollum led the team to a first round upset of Duke.

The Mountain Hawks once again had a chance to punch their ticket to the Big Dance last season but fell to Bucknell in their second consecutive conference championship game loss.

With a a couple of veterans paired with some new faces, 11-year head coach Brett Reed is hoping his program can get over the hump this season.

“I think we were close,” Reed said. “We were in the championship game for the second straight season...I think that demonstrates that we were doing some things pretty productively. However, there was just something a little missing with our team, so we went back to basics and we entered this season really honing in on some of the small details of our program.”

Lehigh loses its top two scorers and two program stalwarts in forward Tim Kempton (20.4 ppg) and guard Austin Price (13.3 ppg). Kempton was a 2,000-point scorer who ranks third in scoring and second in rebounding in Lehigh’s program history. Price is 13th on the school’s all-time scoring list and second in made 3-pointers.

The two leave big shoes to fill which will not be filled by one or two individuals. Reed is preaching unselfishness to his players this season as it will take a group effort to replace the production of Kempton and Price.

Luckily for Reed, he will have a steadying presence on the court in senior guard Kahron Ross. The 5-11 guard from Arkansas enters this season with more career assists than all but two Division I players and he has played more than 3,000 minutes in his career for the Mountain Hawks.

“I think he’s got a sense that he has a strong hand on the pulse of this team and he can dictate our energy level, he can dictate our performance, our unselfishness,” Reed said. “The one good thing is when you go into a season and you have the loss of guys who have scored the basketball for you and one of your leaders is a guy who really focuses on distribution and is unselfish, it’s easy for that tone to be set for other guys and for us to kind of follow suit.”

Returning alongside Ross in the backcourt is 6-3 junior guard Kyle Leufroy, the team’s top returning scorer. Leufroy averaged 11.4 ppg and shot 42 percent from three last season.

The other top returners for Lehigh are sophomores Pat Andree and Jordan Cohen. Andree, a 6-8 forward, and Cohen, a 6-1 guard, are the only other Mountain Hawks who averaged more than 19 minutes per game last season as freshmen.

Lehigh adds four freshmen to the mix this season. James Karnik, a 6-9 center from Canada, will step in and play right away.

“We have Kahron who’s really experienced and Kyle who’s really experienced, but other than that we don’t have a lot of experience,” Andree said.

“We all want to get back to the Patriot League tournament, especially losing it two years in a row,” he added. “We’re excited to start the year back up again and show what we got, keep building, keep working off our experienced guys to try to get in good shape in March.”

As Lehigh went on its run to the Patriot League championship last season, all Lance Tejada could do was watch. Tejada sat out the 2016-17 campaign after transferring from East Carolina. He averaged 4.2 points and 1.5 assists per game in about 14 and a half minutes of action during his 64 career contests with the Pirates.

The 6-foot-2, 190-pound guard has a skillset that fits Reed’s theme of unselfishness. Reed described him as having the mindset of a point guard with the skills of a scorer. Last season, he spent a lot of time going against Ross and particularly Leufroy in practice on the scout team. This year the three likely will be spending a lot of time on the floor together.

“I’m used to having the ball in my hands, but I know how to play without it,” Tejada said. “We all complement each other well...We just need the game experience and then we’ll go from there.”

The last time Lehigh made the NCAA Tournament, Andree remembers the Mountain Hawks busting his bracket. He would like the chance to repeat history but knows the team can’t look too far ahead.

“We obviously want to be there again, but it’s a process,” Andree said. “We have 30 games to get there and we just want to build off every game.”