Early in the season, teams thought they found a weak spot in the Northwestern offense.

The Tigers had trouble against zone defenses at times, at least enough to slow down their offense a little.

Naturally, Northwestern worked to improve against the zone in practice, and they also ran into it in games.

Now teams should start to recognize that they need to look for another way to hinder the scoring machine from New Tripoli because practice may not have made perfect, but it has made Northwestern much better against the zone.

The latest example came Friday night when the Tigers gathered momentum offensively and went on to beat Lehighton 59-44.

Malachi Coleman led all scorers with 18 points in the game with Mason Bollinger scoring 15 and Cannon Fitch 11 for Northwestern. Blake Roberts paced 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 and keep an eye out for who is able to pop open.

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 6-4 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. All we have to do is find that guy and put him in an easy position to score points,” explained Krimmel, who finished with eight points.

The Tigers offense started to roll in the second quarter when they scored seven unanswered points to push their lead to 13. Going into halftime, Northwestern led 30-18 and came out firing to score the first four points of the second half. Meanwhile, Lehighton came out in the second half and picked up four fouls in the first 23 seconds of the third quarter as they struggled to get on track.

Eventually, the Tribe did get going and appeared to be able to chip away at the Northwestern lead, but their momentum seemed to end as quickly as it started when Fitch hit a three-pointer from the left side to put the lead back at 16 (40-24) with 3:42 left in the third.

Lehighton was working to keep itself in the game but was down by 13 heading into the final eight minutes of play.

Just under a minute into the fourth, Northwestern was able to 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 for what would be the largest lead of the night. Half of Coleman’s points came in the fourth quarter to end any hopes for Lehighton.

Another area of improvement has come defensively.

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 15.

“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.”

AND NOW, THE END IS NEAR … Northwestern has just four games left in the regular season and Lehighton has five. The two teams will meet each other again in 10 days on Lehighton’s home court. Friday night’s win gave Northwestern the West Division title, and it is currently second overall in the Colonial League one game back of Notre Dame-Green Pond. Lehighton holds the seventh spot in the league with eight teams qualifying for the postseason. Bangor and Jim Thorpe are working to catch Lehighton with the Indians and Olympians meeting in the regular season finale.

LEHIGHTON

Solt 2-0-0-4, Meek 2-2-2-6, Fairchild 1-0-0-3, Roberts 7-0-0-15, Deitz 3-3-4-9, White 1-1-2-3, McCarroll 1-0-0-2, Seidler 0-0-2-0, Steigerwalt 0-0-0-0, Hunsicker 1-0-0-2. TOTALS: 18-6-10-44.

NORTHWESTERN

Bollinger 7-0-0-15, Zimmerman 3-0-0-7, Fitch 4-1-3-11, Krimmel 2-3-4-8, Coleman 9-0-0-18, Lagowy 0-0-0-0, Wertman 0-0-0-0, Kozlowski 0-0-0-0, Hechler 0-0-0-0, Kumernitsky 0-0-0-0, Mish 0-0-0-0, Leviano-Isley 0-0-0-0. TOTALS: 25-4-7-59.

Lehighton 10 8 13 13 - 44

N’western 18 12 15 14 - 59

Three-pointers: Lehighton - Fairchild 1, Roberts 1; Northwestern - Fitch 2, Bollinger 1, Krimmel 1, Zimmerman 1.

Records: Lehighton (9-8, 7-7); Northwestern (13-5; 12-2).