Northwestern’s weakest link is much stronger now than it was at the start of the season. Opponents tended to run zone defenses against the Northwestern Lehigh boys basketball team early in the season and thought they had found a weak spot.

The Tigers were struggling against zone defenses, but they have seen enough of it. Now, it’s up to other teams to see if they can find something else to exploit.

Lehighton was the latest team to try to work a zone defense against the Tigers and it ended up in a 59-44 loss for the Indians when they came to New Tripoli last Friday.

Malachi Coleman led all scorers with 18 points in the game with Mason Bollinger scoring 15 and Cannon Fitch 11 for Northwestern. Blake Roberts led the Indians with 15 points.

“We face it almost every game,” said Bollinger of going up against zone defenses. “Teams have kept playing it against us and we’ve been working in practice and keep working to get better at it. Now, it’s kind of where we want them to run it because we know how to work around it and just keep scoring.”

One of the things that Northwestern has done is to work on its ball movement. Coleman found some points by hanging out just in front of the arc away from the ball movement and waiting for a pass to come out to him. At times, it looked like Lehighton almost forgot about Coleman, who at 6-foot-4 is hard to lose.

“We tried to have them double a lot of guys and it creates an advantage four-on-three and someone’s going to be open,” said Northwestern’s Brady Krimmel, who scored eight points in the win. “All we have to do is find that guy and put him in an easy position to score points.”

The Tigers offense started to roll in the second quarter when it scored seven unanswered points to push its lead to 13 points.

Northwestern scores the first four points of the second half to lead 34-18. Lehighton picked up four fouls in the first 23 seconds of the third quarter.

Eventually, the Tribe did get going and appeared to be able to chip away at the

Lehighton was down by 13 heading into the final eight minutes. Just under a minute into the fourth, Northwestern put the game away when it went on a 9-2 run that started with Krimmel hitting a pair of foul shots and Coleman scoring five points in a 28-second span to make it 55-35.

Half of Coleman’s points came in the fourth quarter.

The Tigers had a stretch of four games where they allowed opponents to hit 33 shots from beyond the arc, but in their last four games they have cut that number down to 13.

“We have worked on that more lately and are working on getting a hand up and closing down the opportunities,” said Bollinger. “We’re trying to make them work toward the middle more and close out plays.”

Before beating Lehighton, Northwestern downed Jim Thorpe 59-50 as Coleman and Bollinger both scored 15 points in the game and Fitch added 11.

Northwestern has just four games left in the regular season. The Tigers have wrapped up the West Division title in the Colonial League and are currently second overall in the league one game back of Notre Dame – Green Pond.