The Game
South Dakota caps off a long stretch of games Saturday afternoon inside the Sanford Coyote Sports Center. The Coyotes host North Dakota at 1 p.m. Saturday's game is South Dakota's annual Native American Heritage game. Tribes from around the state will make their way to Vermillion for Saturday's game with a pre-game student-athlete honoring and the Lakota Flag Song. Senior guard Mason Archambault is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
 
The game will be streamed for free on GoYotes.com. That broadcast can be found on Midco+ and is the inaugural broadcast of the newly announced GoYotes TV. Fans can tune into the game on The Coyote Sports Network with John Thayer on KVHT 106.3 FM in Yankton/Vermillion or by using The Varsity Network app.
 
The Series
North Dakota leads the all-time series 104-94. South Dakota has held its own on its home floor against the Fighting Hawks as they have won 52 of 88 meetings in Vermillion. The Coyotes have won the last three games in the series.
 
The last meeting in Grand Forks came down to the final seconds. Kruz Perrott-Hunt lifted South Dakota to a road win with a turnaround jumper in the final seconds. Perrott-Hunt tied with Paul Bruns with a team-best 15 points in that contest. Tasos Kamateros added 12 points of his own.
 
The Coyotes
South Dakota responded in a big way after Monday's game with a 71-62 win over North Dakota State Thursday night in Vermillion. In the game Thursday night, South Dakota junior
forward Kamateros had a season-high 23 points on 8-of-11 shooting. Kamateros also went 4-of-5 from the three-point line. He also grabbed a team-high nine rebounds. Perrott-Hunt added 15 points on 6-of-12 from the floor while Max Burchill tied a career-high of 11 points. Burchill added two rebounds, two assists, and a steal to his stat line.
 
Paul Bruns will face off against his former team for the second time this year. Bruns was the Summit League Freshman of the Year and received all-Summit League honorable mention in his freshman season at North Dakota. He led all freshman in the conference in scoring and rebounding and had nine 20-plus point performances in his time as a Fighting Hawk. In the first meeting against North Dakota, Bruns scored 15 points on 6-of-9 from the floor and hauled in a team-high nine rebounds in 28 minutes of play.
 
The Fighting Hawks
North Dakota has struggled in league play for the second straight season. The Fighting Hawks are 3-26 in Summit League play dating back to last season. UND picked up its first conference win of the season on Jan. 19 with a home win over Kansas City. North Dakota won in convincing fashion with a 17-point margin of victory. Since then, the Hawks have dropped four straight games and recently fell 96-73 at South Dakota State Thursday night. Tsotne Tsartsidze had 18 points and 10 boards in the loss to the Jacks Thursday for his second double-double of the season.

Freshman B.J. Omot, junior Matt Norman, and Tsartsidze are the main trio for UND this season. Omot leads the team with 11.5 points per game while Norman scores 10.5 points per game. Tsartsidze is on the verge of double-digit scoring with 9.3 points per game. Freshman Treysen Eaglestaff scored what was a season-best 18 points in the last meeting against South Dakota. He has had three more double-digit scoring outings since then highlighted by a season-high 19 points versus Kansas City. Omot had 15 and Jalun Trent had 10 to round out the double-digit scoring efforts in the first meeting against USD.
 
One Last Thing
Perrott-Hunt is on the verge of history as he has 996 career points. He is four points away from 1,000 points in his South Dakota career. Perrott-Hunt would become the 32nd member of the 1,000-point club in South Dakota basketball history.