ORONO – From the day after the University of Maine men’s basketball team was eliminated from postseason play last March, one question kept popping up among Black Bear fans.

Who’s going to play point guard next year?

Four games into “next year,” with the return from injury of the versatile Errick Greene and the emergence of freshman point guard Tory Cavalieri, that question has an easy answer.

Take your pick.

Greene is the starter, but the fact that he can play any one of four positions leaves plenty of backcourt minutes available.

Enter Cavalieri.

When the 3-1 Black Bears return to Orono to take on Alaska-Fairbanks in their home debut tonight at 7:30 p.m., Cavalieri will play a key role.

“Tory is everything that we thought he would be,” UMaine coach John Giannini said.

“I was pretty confident he would be able to run our offense and pass the ball well,” Giannini said. “What I wasn’t sure about was how much he could create, read defenses, beat pressure and just do things that better and more experienced point guards do. He’s done all those things right off the bat.”

The 5-foot-11, 165-pounder from Atlantic City, N.J. will enter the game having compiled some impressive stats in his first two weeks of college action.

He’s the Black Bears’ third-leading scorer at 9.9 points per game and leads the team in assists (4.3 per game). He’s also tops among UMaine regulars in field goal percentage (.480) and has been playing an average of 26.3 minutes a contest (fifth-most on the team).

Included in his early efforts are a 17-point outing against Troy State and a 10-assist night at Prairie View A&M.

Cavalieri said he’s comfortable in a backup role to Greene.

“If they need me to come off the bench and be a spark, then I’m fine with it,” Cavalieri said. “Starting’s not a big deal to me.”

Junior guard Huggy Dye said he didn’t think it would take Cavalieri long to adapt to college.

“The little kid is tough. He can play. He’s a warrior out there on the floor,” Dye said. “I like him a lot, and I knew that it was just gonna be a matter of a couple of games [to adapt], to just shake out the jitters and get used to the way Division I basketball is played.”

Cavalieri said that adjustment was hastened by his work with the UMaine guards and new assistant coach Andy Bedard – last year’s all-conference point guard.

Cavalieri said playing against stronger guards like Greene and Tommy Waterman all preseason got him ready for the college game.

“Between the college and high school level the main difference is the physicalness,” Cavalieri said. “In high school I was real strong. I could go down low and bang with some big men. Up here it’s not like that. There are guards a lot stronger than I am right now.”

But Cavalieri said Bedard has taken a special interest in him that has made the transition easier.

“To me, [Bedard’s hiring] is the best thing that’s happened to this program since I’ve been here because it’s perfect for me: a point guard who played here, who knows the system, and now he’s coaching.”

Cavalieri has also played against his new coach quite a bit … and he’s not above getting in a playful jab.

“[Bedard is] real good, but he’s losing a bit,” Cavalieri joked. “He’s getting a little out of shape and a little old, but he’s still got a lot.”

Bears happy to be home

Giannini’s Black Bears got home from their two-town, five-day road trip late Tuesday night and the effects of the trip were a concern on Wednesday.

“It really cuts into what we would normally do to prepare for a game,” Giannin said on Wednesday afternoon as he hurried to finish watching breaking down Alaska-Fairbanks’ tendencies on videotape.

Giannini said his team has performed well in the past when they have one day of practice and then a game-day walkthrough as preparation for an opponent.

The travel to Alabama for Troy State and to Texas to face Prairie View A&M complicate matters, however.

“I’m just hoping that physically, we’re fresh enough to get something out of the time that we spend in the gym,” Giannini said.

Dye said the Black Bears can’t afford to use the road trip as an excuse.

“You’ve got to fight fatigue. You can’t let fatigue get you down,” Dye said. “Some of the guys said that they felt ‘all right’ today. I think they should say, ‘I feel good! I feel great!’ We’ve got a game tomorrow. We should be excited and not let fatigue get us.”

Division II matchup explained

Tonight’s game against the Division II Nanooks is a rarity for the Black Bears: America East banned games against non-Division I opponents in the fall of 1998 in an effort to improve the league’s Ratings Percentage Index ranking.

So why are the Bears playing against Alaska-Fairbanks?

“The conference tried to help us last year by sponsoring an ‘exempt’ tournament here in Orono [for this weekend],” Giannini said. “The idea was to get cooperation from three other Northeast conferences and have it be a conference showdown format.”

There was only one problem: After contacting every league they could, America East and UMaine officials could only lure one team to Orono, even with the lure that comes with an exempt tourney: two games that count as one on the schedule. Also, the conference was going to help UMaine find a sponsor that would have paid teams’ expenses.

“When it became clear [in late spring] that we were pretty much past the drop-dead date, we still needed to fill this date [with a game] and the conference allowed us to play Alaska-Fairbanks,” Giannini said.

Giannini said the reason nobody wanted to come to Orono to play in the tourney was obvious.

“It’s the same thing as always, and I’m beating a dead horse on this,” Giannini said.

“People schedule games for one of four reasons: They either think they have a very good chance to win; they’re going to a key recruiting area; they’re going to get media and television exposure; or they’re going to make a lot of money,” Giannini said.

“We just don’t offer any of the above to anyone,” he said. “If I was a coach building up my schedule, I would not feel a need to go to Maine when I can meet those other objectives at other places.”