With the pre-season winding down, the Nipissing Lakers men's basketball team has been able to do some learning as well as improving during their exhibition schedule.

Most recently, they hit the road and travelled west to take part in the Golden Bear Invitational, as well as play an additional exhibition game in Edmonton.

The Lakers finished with a 1-2 record, defeating the MacEwan Griffins 78-71, before falling to the Alberta Golden Bears 84-67 and UBC Thunderbirds, 83-59.

Now with just one more game on their schedule before their home opener, the team was able to assess their trip to Alberta's capital.

They knew going out west to play three exhibition games was going to be extremely competitive, especially against three Canada West teams that all made the playoffs, with UBC hosting the National Championships. Both Alberta and UBC has had their success at the National level advancing to the Elite 8 respectively and each program producing high level players.

Lakers head coach Chris Cheng knew his team would be up against strong opposition, but that's what he wanted as they approach the regular season, which begins Nov. 11.

"I wanted my team to experience playing against this type of competition. When you face tough teams they force you to play tougher. Having a tough exhibition schedule will only prepare us to play in our tough OUA conference. Every night in our league you are going against a contender," Cheng said. "The plan was to have them be tougher after this experience. Time will tell if the trip was a valuable experience to this squad. Over the course of the week, my team displayed growth in areas we needed to be."

The best part of exhibition games for the Lakers was the ability to see what worked with their personnel and what didn't in all situations.

Both offensively and defensively require different amounts of attention and now Cheng has seen his team in eight pre-season games, which is a decent amount of time on the court to evaluate.

"Whether that was on the defensive and offensive glass, our transition defense, transition offense, recognizing match-ups and creating advantages, and executing game plans. The games also gave me an opportunity to mix different lineups and to see what lineup I can have on the floor in different scenarios within the game," Cheng said. "The games also showed where we needed to improve and where we just didn't have the advantage against our opponent. Overall, this was good for us to recognize. Now we learn to fix it and make it part of our team DNA."

Against the Griffins, the Lakers were the better team, but had to work for the victory – the team knew it wouldn't come easy and it didn't, but they came away with the seven point victory.

In their two losses, there was positives to take away despite the results, which were very secondary at this point in the season.

The last two games the Lakers played they were within striking distance to tie or regain the lead in the fourth quarter, but the opposition's experience and physicality took over in the fourth which Nipissing couldn't match. This resulted in a huge discrepancy in the score.

Cheng said he's looking for his team to close out games better, no matter if they're winning or losing – they need to finish strong.

"The fourth quarter difference is what I was hoping for my team to experience. They needed to learn how to increase the level of competition and execution and how to close games," he said.

The team will look to fine tune things one more time next Friday on home court.

The final exhibition game of the season at home next Friday, Nov. 4 against Laval University

Tip-off is at 7:00 pm at the RJS Athletic Centre.