Quick Hits About The Hounds
- The Loyola University Maryland men's basketball opens the doors to Reitz Arena for the second time this season with a Saturday, November 9, game against Lancaster Bible College in a 7:30 p.m. contest.
- Josh Loeffler will be on the bench as the Greyhounds' head coach after being taking the position as Loyola's 22nd all-time head coach in March 2024.
- He is joined on the bench by four assistant coaches: Matt Blue, Kevin Farrell, Ricky Hernandez and Khyle Diaz.
- The Greyhounds will be a new-look team in more ways than just its head coach for the 2024-25 season. Of the 6,475 total minutes played by Loyola players last year, only 53 percent of those return on the roster.
- The game is the second of 11 non-conference contests for the Greyhounds this season before they start their 18-game non-conference slate.
- Loyola starts the season with two-straight home games in nine years since it began against Tennessee State and LIU Brooklyn in 2015-16.
- November 4 was the earliest on the calendar that the Greyhounds have ever played a regular-season game. It is one day earlier than the November 5, 2019, contest at Marquette.
Watch The Action
- The Loyola-Lancaster Bible game, and all non-televised Greyhounds home contests, will stream live on ESPN+.
Series History Versus Lancaster Bible
- The Greyhounds and Chargers will meet for the first time in series history when they take the floor on Saturday.
About The Chargers
- Lancaster Bible, which opens its 2024-25 schedule the night prior to facing Loyola with a road game at Ramapo College, went 16-10 overall last season and had a 10-2 mark in the United East Conference.
- The Chargers finished second in the conference's Volt Division before losing in the semifinal of the divisional playoffs to St. Mary's College of Maryland.
- Grant Sareyka returns after leading the Chargers with a 21.2 points per game average a year ago. Connor Storr is also back after scoring 11.8 points and leading the team with 4.6 rebounds per game.
Last Time Out
- All five Loyola starters scored in double figures, and Milos Ilic had his second career double-double with 18 points and 11 rebounds, but Columbia came back for an 81-78 non-conference victory in Reitz Arena on Monday.
- Jacob Theodosiou and Braeden Speed made their Loyola debuts with 14 and 13 points, respectively, while David Brown III and Jordan Stiemke each scored 10. Veljko Ilic nearly made it six players in double figures, finishing with nine points.
- The Greyhounds led by as many as 13 points in the first half, but the the gap was six, 41-35, at halftime.
- Brown scored off an Ilic feed with 7:31 to go in regulation, and a Chris Kuzemka free throw with 6:51 on the clock turned it into a 68-56 Greyhounds advantage with 6:51 on the clock.
- Loyola controlled a 35-31 advantage on the boards led by Milos Ilic's 11. Theodosiou had six, and both Stiemke and Brown grabbed four. Stiemke had three steals in the game, and Brown led Loyola with three assists.
Five Above Ten
- Five Loyola players scored in double figures in the season opener against Columbia, marking the first time in 117 games.
- The last time the Greyhounds did so was in a February 19, 2020, game against Army West Point that was an 81-77 victory at home. In that game, Andrew Kostecka scored 17, Isaiah Hart had 16, Santi Aldama scored 13, KaVaughn Scott added 12 points and 12 rebounds, and Cam Spencer scored 11.
Twenty-Seven From Two Debuts
- Jacob Theodosiou and Braeden Speed made their Loyola debuts on Monday night, and the backcourt pair combined to score 27 points.
- Theodosiou, a sophomore transfer from Wyoming, and Speed, a freshman from Phoenix, Arizona, opened in the starting five for the Greyhounds. Speed led the Greyhounds at halftime with 11 points and finished with 13, while Theodosiou split his 14 points evenly over the two halves.
- The two combined to shoot 11 of 21 from the field 3 of 7 from 3-point range.
Efficient With More Shots
- Monday night's game was the fifth time in Milos Ilic's career that he took more than 10 shots from the field, something he did four times a year ago.
- The senior from Serbia went 7 of 10 from the field against the Lions and is 29 of 53 (.547) in the five games he's shot 10 or more times.
- In only one of those games, a December 2023 contest at La Salle, did Ilic not shoot 50 percent or better from the field; he was 4 of 10 shooting in that game.
- Ilic also had the second double-double of his career with 18 points and 11 rebounds. He had his first with 11 points and 10 rebounds in the aforementioned game against La Salle. It was Ilic's fifth career game with 10 or more rebounds, the other four coming last season.
Continuing To Board
- By outrebounding Columbia, 35-31, in the November 4 opener, Loyola continued a strength from the 2023-24 season.
- During the 2023-24 season, Loyola pulled down 34.3 rebounds to its opponents 32.8.
Addition From Injury
- While the Greyhounds lost a significant number of minutes played from last year's roster, they do return a considerable group that was out last season due to injury.
- Chris Kuzemka was averaging 6.7 points and shooting 36.7 percent from 3-point range through nine games when a broken hand in the December 6 contest at La Salle forced him to miss the rest of the year.
- A guard, Kuzemka averaged 21.6 minutes per game before his injury and had made one start. His season-high of 15 points came at Columbia, a week before his injury.
- Veljko Ilic missed all of last season and the last chunk of the 2022-23 season with an injury, but his return bolsters the Greyhounds' post play.
- Ilic averaged 13.7 minutes of action in 44 games from 2021-23, scoring 5.2 points and grabbing 3.3 rebounds per game.
- Samuel Gibbs was a rotation player for Loyola in the first five games of the year, averaging 6.6 minutes per, before missing the remainder of the season with an injury. A pair of freshmen, Troy Cicero Jr. and Matt Gray, were limited to four games and one game, respectively, last year.
Twins Back Together
- Twins Milos and Veljko Ilic are rarely apart off the court, but they have been separated in playing time since the 2021-22 season.
- They played together in 26 games that year before a knee injury cut Milos Ilic's season short during the second half of Patriot League play.
- He would miss the entirety of the 2022-23 season while rehabilitating the leg, and Veljko Ilic missed the first 13 games of that year with an off-season injury. He came back to the lineup to play in 14 games during 2022-23 before injuring his knee and missing the remainder of the year and all of 2023-24.
- Milos Ilic was on the court last year, save for two games, but Monday's 2024-25 season-opener is expected to be the first time they have played in a regular-season game together in 993 days since February 16, 2022, the date of Milos' injury.
Milos In The Middle
- A solid player his first two seasons on the court for the Greyhounds, Milos Ilic is expected to take an elevated role in the offense this season as the team's top returning scorer.
- Last year, Ilic averaged 7.6 points per game on just under seven shots per game. He shot 48.1 percent from the field in the process, a number that was identical in non-conference play versus Patriot League games.
- Ilic had his first career double-double in December 2023 at La Salle and finished the year third on the team with 5.1 rebounds per game.
Stiemke Spark
- Jordan Stiemke drew his first starting assignment for Loyola on February 3, 2024, against Holy Cross and scored five points in 17 minutes of action. He then upped his playing time to 25 minutes on February 7 at American, converting a layup and free throw for the game-winning points while finishing with six points and six rebounds.
- He then saw 32 minutes of action against Colgate on February 10, scoring 12 points for career-highs in both categories. The freshman from Bel Air, Maryland, came up with another career high four days later at Lafayette, going for 18 points in 38 minutes of action.
- Stiemke had his best statistical game on February 25 at Boston University, scoring 23 points on 8 of 18 shooting and 5 of 10 from the floor.
- The native of Bel Air, Maryland, has been Loyola's second-leading scorer since moving into the starting rotation, averaging 10.3 points in the 10 games. Prior to that, he had scored just 34 points in 15 games.
- As a starter to end 2023-24, he shot 42.3 percent from the field, 45.7 from 3-point range and 78.0 at the free-throw line. His biggest statistical improvement came in 3-point shooting where he was just 3 of 12 (.250) in his first 15 before going 21 of 46 in the last 10.
New Faces
- Five new players dot the roster for the Greyhounds, four freshmen and a sophomore transfer.
- Jacob Theodosiou joined the program after spending his first collegiate season at Wyoming where he played in 10 games for the Cowboys. Theodosiou is a native of Ontario, Canada, but he played in high school at Western Reserve Academy in Ohio and helped his school win the Ohio Prep Conference Championship as a senior when he averaged 18 points and six rebounds in 2022-23.
- Braeden Speed comes to Loyola from Brophy Prep in Phoenix, Arizona, he earned All-State Second Team honors and helped the Broncos to the Class 6A (largest group) State Championship Game in 2022-23.
- Greg Guidinger led Central York High School to the 2024 Pennsylvania 6A (largest group) State Championship and was named Mr. PA Basketball a year ago.
- Goap Kodi joins the Greyhoudns out of the DMV area where he was a starting post player for Georgetown Prep's 2023-24 team that went 22-6 overall.
- Ben Menker joined the team as a walk-on from Mason, Ohio, where he earned All-GMC honors at Mason High School.
- The newcomers are not limited to the players for the Greyhounds as two of Josh Loeffler's assistant coaches are new to the Evergreen campus.
- Matt Blue joined the program as an assistant coach after spending the last four years at the NBA Global Academy located Basketball Australia's Centre of Excellence at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. Previously, Blue was a collegiate assistant at Lafayette, Hartford and Susquehanna.
- Khyle Diaz is an assistant coach in his first year at Loyola after serving in an operations role at Cleveland State.
You Look Familiar
- Josh Loeffler slides a few chairs to his right on the Greyhounds bench into the spot as head coach after spending four years as an assistant at Loyola on G.G. Smith's staff from 2013-17.
- Two of his assistants are also familiar to the Loyola crowd.
- Ricky Hernandez was the team's director of operations during the 2023-24 season after spending five years as an assistant to Loeffler down the road at Johns Hopkins.
- Kevin Farrell is a 2012 graduate of Loyola and was a four-year team manager before spending nine years (2012-21) as the team's director of operations.
At The Next Level
- As a school of less than 4,000 undergraduate students, Loyola University Maryland boasted three former student-athletes on NBA rosters as players and one as a head coach last month on opening night. Two members of the men's basketball incoming class of 2019, Santi Aldama (SAHN-tee ALL-dah-muh) and Cam Spencer, are on the Memphis Grizzlies' roster, and four-time men's lacrosse All-American is a member of the Golden State Warriors.
- Michael Malone, a 1994 graduate of Loyola, was a four-year letterwinner as a point guard for the Greyhounds. He is now the head coach of the Denver Nuggets.
- Aldama was a first-round draft pick in the 2021 NBA Draft after leading the Patriot League in scoring and rebounding in 2020-21, and Cam Spencer led the conference in scoring the following season.
- Aldama has played in 176 NBA games through November 1 and is averaging 13.8 points and 7.0 rebounds through six outings this season.
- He starred for his native Spain this summer, earning TISSOT Most Outstanding Player honors at the Olympic Qualifying Tournament before averaging 17.7 points and 9.3 rebounds in three games during the Olympics.
- Cam Spencer, who was a three-year starter for the Greyhounds from 2019-22, and won a NCAA Championship at Connecticut in 2023-24, has not yet played in a NBA game this season.
- Pat Spencer holds the Loyola men's lacrosse records for career assists and points and was the 2019 NCAA Division I Player of the Year for the Greyhounds. He switched to basketball after graduating from Loyola and has seen action in six career games with the Warriors.
- Malone had 282 assists in 108 career games with the Greyhounds from 1989-93. He is in his 12th season as a NBA head coach and guided the Nuggets to the 2023 NBA Championship.
Up Next
- After enjoying their first two games of the season at home, the Greyhounds head on the road for their next two. First, the Greyhounds go to Newark, New Jersey, for a November 12 contest at NJIT.
- Loyola then plays at VCU on Saturday, November 16 before going to Boston College on Tuesday, November 19.
