Al-Amir Dawes is key to Seton Hall’s fading NCAA Tournament hopes
One of the biggest success stories on the team this year will need to play even bigger down the stretch for Seton Hall to contend for the tournament.
A 39-point first half is no small accomplishment for this Seton Hall team.
After the first 20 minutes of Wednesday night’s home game against No. 23 Creighton, I was briefly under the illusion that we were in for a high-scoring affair. The Bluejays were their typical hot-shooting selves, going 6-of-12 from behind the arc to lay 40 points on the Pirates. But Seton Hall, missing one of its top scorers in Dre Davis, kept finding ways to the bucket, be it foul shots, the mid-range or Al-Amir Dawes’ 3-point shooting.
A team not at all known for its offensive prowess thus managed to shoot 50 percent in the first half against a very good Creighton defense. A ranked win, and a Quadrant 1 win, was there for the taking at home.
Then Creighton shot an insurmountable 13-for-20 in the second half and Seton Hall was toast.
“For 34 minutes, I thought we played as well as we’ve played in a long time,” coach Shaheen Holloway said after the 75-62 loss. “Then the last six minutes, we lost our mind and stopped doing the little things, stopped being disciplined on offense and defense, and it cost us. Taking questionable shots that led to runouts for them, then losing (Baylor Scheierman), he hit two big threes. Those are things you can’t do against a good team.”
As opposed to Rutgers, which has a “magic number” of 65 – it’s 16-1 when holding opponents to 65 points or fewer, and lost all seven games that it’s allowed more – Seton Hall’s equivalent might actually be with its offense. This defense, while talented in spots, could not contain the Marquettes and Creightons of the conference. But the Pirates are 10-1 when they score at least 70 points, because it gives their defense a slight cushion to work with.
As long as the Pirates need 70 to shore up a win, Dawes is the key to start that engine. One of the biggest success stories on the team this year will need to play even bigger down the stretch.
Dawes tied a season high of five 3-pointers yesterday, making his first four and finishing 5-of-8. The rest of the team combined to go 1-for-3. He hit the Pirates’ first shot of the game, he hit the first shot of the second half that pushed Seton Hall in front, and when the Pirates had missed eight shots in a row and the game was starting to slip away, there was Dawes with a long 2-point jumper.
The Newark native is shooting 41.4% from deep for the season, has made at least one in every game and now has multiple threes in four straight. For a team that ranks second-to-last in the Big East in both points per game and 3-point percentage, it would be a disaster were his production to dry up.
It’s worth noting that Dawes is more than a one-trick pony. When Holloway recruited him from the transfer portal, he said he thought Dawes could be more than just a shooter. He added three assists and two steals to the ledger Wednesday.
“I’m getting back to that day by day,” Dawes said in November. “I took it step by step. Where I was at for the past few years (at Clemson), I was able to just shoot it. But now I can be more of a facilitator, you know, get my guys going and get the team rolling.”
The assist totals don’t wow you, but Dawes does facilitate, sometimes in the form of hockey assists or turning a steal into a runout. The best thing he could do to “get his guys going,” I’d argue, is to figure out how to get his shooting form to rub off on his teammates.
Kadary Richmond scored 10 on Wednesday but shot 4-of-15, as his drives to the hoop rarely worked against rim protector Ryan Kalkbrenner. Tyrese Samuel scored 11 but was in foul trouble for the third straight game. I liked Femi Odukale’s 4-of-5, all from inside the arc, and other than his own foul trouble I wonder why he didn’t get a few more looks.
Finally, getting Dre Davis back from an ankle sprain will matter a lot. Scoring 9.1 points per game off the bench may not impress a passerby, but he’s averaged just 19.3 minutes, so his average per 40 minutes is actually 18.9 points. And at 35.3%, he’s been a much better 3-point shooter than in his two years at Louisville.
“(Getting Davis back) would make a huge difference. It’s another body,” Dawes said Wednesday. “We just need his energy and what he brings too. We need everybody.”
Other than that, though, we’ve seen 25 games. This is what Seton Hall’s offense is; it needs Dawes plus one or two other guys to be rolling at once to hit the 70-point range. The Pirates are 2-6 when Dawes doesn’t score in double figures.
With the Creighton game having slipped away, Seton Hall still has three games against ranked teams on the horizon, just one at home: at UConn, hosting Xavier and at Providence. Having a win over UConn in their back pocket should help embolden the Pirates, but after Wednesday, they’re 0-6 against the top four teams in the league, and the lack of Quadrant 1 wins could come back to bite them when it’s time to sort out the tournament bubble.
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Hey there. Thanks for checking out this slightly abridged check-in of Seton Hall. As I mentioned on Twitter, I came down with COVID-19 the other day, so I did what I could from the TV broadcast and postgame pressers being posted online. I’m already doing much better and looking forward to this weekend, God willing.
Why don’t we clean the glass and get out of here:
By now you know Rutgers has lost starting four Mawot Mag for the season with a torn ACL suffered last Saturday at MSG. The plan to replace him yielded mixed results Tuesday in the No. 24 Scarlet Knights’ 66-60 loss at No. 18 Indiana. It’s going to be Aundre Hyatt in the starting lineup, much more of Oskar Palmquist off the bench than we saw in January, plus an extra dash of bigs Dean Reiber and Antwone Woolfolk for balance.
Hyatt and Palmquist are both 3-point threats, and they each scored nine points against Indiana. But they aren’t as stellar two-way players or rebounders as Mag proved to be. Palmquist was a minus-11 against Indiana, for example. Let’s see how this works out in time. Saturday’s trip to Illinois will be no cakewalk for Rutgers, either, and it risks falling into the enormous cluster of teams in the middle of the Big Ten.Ladies and gentlemen, the Monmouth Hawks are back! After coming tantalizingly close to beating a good UNC Wilmington team on the road Jan. 26, this team was 1-20. They haven’t lost since, surprising four CAA opponents in a row. They trailed by 11 late in the first half against Delaware and by 14 to Drexel before storming back to win both those games. The biggest reason for the turnaround: Tahron Allen, who’s turning defense into offense like water into wine for this team. After a quiet start to his season he’s been the Hawks’ leading scorer three of the past four games; he had 22 points, six rebounds and six steals in yesterday’s 61-54 road win over Stony Brook.
The Northeast Conference race is tightening, but check this out: The two teams Fairleigh Dickinson (7-3) is sandwiched between, Stonehill (8-3) and Merrimack (7-4), are still “transitioning” to Division I and therefore ineligible for the NCAA Tournament. It’s a four-year transition period mandated by the NCAA. Stonehill is new this year and trying to do what Merrimack did in 2019-20: win the conference regular-season title in its first season.
Last season, D1 transitioner Bellarmine won its conference tournament and couldn’t go dancing. Rather than the NCAA giving the berth to tournament runner-up Jacksonville, it went to the regular-season champ, Jacksonville State (confused yet?).
Edit: After publication, I learned from NEC broadcaster and insider Ryan Peters that the league’s presidents voted to let the tournament runner-up receive the NCAA bid in the event an ineligible team wins the conference tourney. Peters also noted that Stonehill won’t be allowed to compete in the NEC tournament this early in its transition, but Merrimack will be there.
This makes for an eight-team NEC tournament, and FDU is still sitting pretty. It’s on pace to receive a favorable postseason seed and can qualify for March Madness either by winning it all or in the event it loses to Merrimack in the final.The regular-season race takes on added urgency for the Knights for this reason. Mathematicians won’t like how I oversimplify this, but in a world where FDU wins the regular-season banner in the nine-team league, it’d have a 33.3% chance of making March Madness – because any one of FDU, Stonehill or Merrimack winning the NEC tourney would result in the Knights receiving the league’s bid. If Stonehill or Merrimack place first in the regular season and FDU is the highest-finishingtournament-eligibleteam behind them, I have to assume the Knights would be in line for the bid as well, but I haven’t confirmed that.