A challenging stretch of Conference USA road games is coming with added complications for Western Kentucky’s men’s basketball team.

The Hilltoppers played without leading scorers Teagan Moore and Armelo Boone, both out with injuries, in Saturday’s 73-58 road loss to Sam Houston — it was WKU’s lowest point total this season.

Heading into Wednesday’s 6 p.m. matchup against Kennesaw State in Kennesaw, Georgia, it appears the Tops won’t be getting either player back. WKU coach Hank Plona said Monday he doesn’t expect Moore to return even by this coming Saturday’s road game against Middle Tennessee, while Boone possibly could be available by then.

Moore was injured late in last Thursday’s home loss to Liberty after an on-court collision and fall that left him with concussion-like symptoms. The following day at the end of practice, Plona said Boone “tweaked his ankle.”

“Two consecutive days where obviously some unfortunate injury issues for our team and a very tough road trip to Sam Houston, so obviously trying to gather ourselves and get back together,” Plona said. “We’ve got two more … basically the second half of the league coming up here, two more road games this week and we’ll try to bounce back and get together and kind of get back to our basics, come out, make sure we go represent ourselves well on Wednesday and try to get a win.”

That might be a big ask, considering Moore (17.2 points per game) and Boone (11.8 points per game) represent a significant chunk of the Tops’ scoring potential. With both on the floor during the first meeting with Sam Houston on Jan. 2, WKU (11-9 overall, 4-5 CUSA) rolled to a 102-91 win at E.A. Diddle Arena. Just more than three weeks later, the Tops score barely more than half that total in the rematch without Moore and Boone.

“We need to play with a lot more confidence and pace and gusto than we did on Saturday,” Plona said. “We haven’t had turnover issues all year and we just played with some hesitancy, and teams are trying to really get into us and punk us — be physical and stuff like that. So it really didn’t matter what we did on Saturday. It was really a matter of how we did it.”

That doesn’t bode well heading into Wednesday’s second meeting with Kennesaw State, which overcame losing CUSA Preseason Player of the Year Simeon Cottle, then the league’s leading scorer, just the day before the Jan. 17 game at Diddle when Cottle was suspended indefinitely by the school after being among men’s college basketball players named and facing charges in a federal investigation into points shaving.

Without Cottle, the Owls still handled the Tops for an 81-65 road win. Guard RJ Johnson scored a game-high 31 points and grabbed nine rebounds and personified Kennesaw’s edge in physicality and toughness against the Tops.

But since that win, Kennesaw State (12-8, 4-5 CUSA) has lost two straight with road defeats to Sam Houston and Louisiana Tech — the Bulldogs held Johnson to one point in an 82-76 win on Friday.

“I still think that he becomes the focus,” Plona said of Johnson. “I was very curious of how that happened, and I think there was some strategy things that Louisiana Tech did. I also think that he missed some shots at the beginning of the game that he usually makes and maybe that adjusted what they did, but obviously he scored a few more against us and he scored a few more than that in the game after that too.”

In Saturday’s loss to the Bearkats, guard LJ Hackman led the way with 14 points. Grant Newell added 10 points, while Leeroy Odiahi delivered his second straight impactful game with a 5-for-5 effort from the field for a career-high 10 points off the bench.

Plona expects the Owls to again challenge the Tops’ willingness to fight for space in the paint during Wednesday’s game at the KSU Convocation Center. The game will be live streamed on ESPN+.

“They switch off the ball, they try to really push your catches out,” Plona said. “So we need to make sure our cutting is good. We need to score backdoor at the rim, we need to get touches, we can’t just run to the ball when we don’t know what to do. We’ve got to be able to play with pace in transition so really trying to get back to some things that we built our foundation on in October and November that it seemed like were non-existent on Saturday.”