Toledo’s Keith Triplett, who scored a game-high 21 points, led his team in five statistical categories, but his coach didn’t seem satisfied.

“By the way he plays, [he’s a leader],” Toledo coach Stan Joplin said, after his team’s 77-64 road victory over NIU on Saturday. “But I want him to talk more. He’s not where I think he should be. Will he ever be? I doubt it. But he’s a work in progress.”

Joplin added that Triplett needs to rebound better.

“He likes to float around the perimeter,” Joplin said.

At Saturday’s game, the 6-foot-3 senior had a team-high seven rebounds. Staying around the perimeter, the MAC’s second-leading scorer (19.8 ppg) swiped a game-high four steals. He also is second in conference in steals at 2.11 spg.

NIU coach Rob Judson knows the importance of Triplett, who has led the Rockets to the second-best record in the MAC West at 8-2 and 14-4 overall.

As NIU held an 18-point lead, Triplett had zero points midway through the first half.

However, the Ohio native scored 11 points in the final 4:50 of the first half, to lead his team into the locker room with a 37-35 advantage.

“He got them right back into the game,” said Judson, who combated Triplett’s scoring barrage with a box-in-one defense to start the second half.

Triplett would go on to score only six points in the second half, but the rest of his team was too much for NIU. Helped by Triplett’s five assists, four Rockets players finished in double digits – more than any NIU player.

“I was fading too much on my shot at the start,” Triplett said. “Then I began to shoot it right, and they started falling.”

They fell to the tune of 5-of-7 from three-point range.

But what if Joplin gets a satisfactory performance in Toledo’s second meeting with NIU on Feb. 11?