Column: Seton Hall, Rider and the challenge of beating your rival three times
Saint Peter’s remains alive for the MAAC title. The Pirates and Broncs are wondering ‘what if’ in their respective leagues.
NEW YORK – You hear it often said in the NFL, whenever a team sweeps a division opponent only to draw them again in the playoffs: It’s hard to beat a team three times.
It seems, from a few Google searches, there have been contrarian attempts recently to “dispel” that truism by using hand-picked data samples. For one, the saying isn’t that it’s “impossible” or it’s “rare” to pull off the feat. “Hard” isn’t necessarily quantifiable when you aren’t behind the scenes, crunching that extra hour of film because you’re looking for some new advantage over your rival.
But moreover, it was Dean Smith himself who put the claim to ink in his memoir, as he explained how winning the ACC tournament was harder to him than making the Final Four. “Complicating matters was the fact that it was the third meeting of the year with your conference rivals, which meant you knew each other very well,” Smith said. “It was extremely hard to beat a good team three times in a row.” You want to act like you know better than Dean Smith? Be my guest.
Smith’s sport is different than football. Fewer players are involved. Coaches are arguably far more important. When teams have this third encounter in a conference tournament, most of the time it’s at a neutral site.
Not impossible. But absolutely difficult.
Seton Hall is feeling the sting of an early exit from the Big East tournament after Thursday’s 91-72 loss to a St. John’s team it defeated in January and February.
St. John’s, as it looks at present, is nothing like the team Seton Hall took advantage of on those days. The Red Storm played terrible second-half basketball for much of the Big East season. This time around, when they established a double-digit lead, they sank their claws in and wouldn’t let go. The Pirates cut the deficit to seven with 10:53 left and back to eight at the 5:55 mark, but this time, St. John’s always had a counterpunch.
When one team learns a lesson and improves over the course of its season, the opponent has to be ready to adapt to it.
“I don’t want to take nothing away from those (St. John’s) guys,” a downcast Shaheen Holloway said. “I thought those guys did well. I know it’d be tough beating a team three times. Obviously I didn’t want to lose like this.”
It didn’t help matters for Seton Hall that Rick Pitino came in as a man on a mission. There’s plenty to be said about Pitino – this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out tied together his off-court controversies and enigmas in singular Torre fashion. Put aside any negative opinions about the man: He’s an elite coach, and this was his first time back at a power-conference tournament since the end of his Louisville tenure in 2017. His first Big East tournament since 2013.
Pitino made it a point to pick up the pace in this game. Faster play, when done right, means avoiding the deflected passes and turnovers that Seton Hall caught them on before. It also can mean tiring out an opponent like Seton Hall that only rolls seven deep. “We felt if we could sub, the pace would be great,” Pitino said.
Throughout the season, Holloway has batted away big-picture questions about Seton Hall and the tournament chase, preferring a one-game-at-a-time mindset like many coaches do. Now that it’s unknown what the next game may be – and whether it’s even going to be in the NCAA Tournament – he answered what his message to the selection committee would be.
“I’ll be honest. I think our resumé speaks for itself,” he said. “I think this is the best conference in the country. We had 13 wins in the best conference in the country. What else are we talking about right now? I thought we had some good wins early on.”
He even took the “quality losses” tack.
“I mean, people forget that USC was a Top 25 team when they beat us,” Holloway said. “Iowa is good. So when you go out and you challenge yourself and play a good schedule, right? I don’t look back and say we had one bad loss. Even a good Rutgers team. Rutgers is an in-state rival. Those games happen.”
But a coach has to say these things in that moment, and Holloway later made it clear that winning this game would have helped the Pirates avoid bubble-watching this weekend and given the selection committee more reason to lock them in.
“I think we let an unbelievable opportunity slip away,” Holloway said. “We kind of put our faith in somebody else’s hands instead of us, you know, taking care of business.”
You saw the same phenomenon several hours later at the MAAC tournament, with Saint Peter’s avenging a regular-season sweep to Rider by winning 50-48 in the quarterfinals.
If that description sounds familiar, it’s because 12 months ago, Saint Peter’s upset a second-seeded Rider team in the MAAC quarters – after Rider earned the season sweep of its rival.
It happened again. For two years running, Bashir Mason and the Peacocks have gotten the better of Kevin Baggett and the Broncs in Atlantic City. In crunch time.
“It’s a mental thing that we don’t put on our guys. They know,” Baggett said. “Going into the tournament, this first round, if you can get past that, the pressure’s off a little bit. I watched Fairfield’s women do it the other day and they pulled it off. These teams, guys get tight in this first game, man. Everybody understands this is a single-game elimination. One game, you go home. It’s a lot of pressure.”
Whereas Pitino’s move was to ratchet up the tempo against Seton Hall, Mason and Saint Peter’s knew their best bet was another slow, defensive rock fight. Rider beat Saint Peter’s 62-57 and 61-56 in the regular season – showing it can play that style perfectly fine – but the Peacocks were tired of being beaten at their own game.
They knew what Rider could throw at them and they were ready.
“I thought the two times we played them, they beat us in what we call the scrap,” Mason said. “They got every loose ball, every loose rebound and they turned those into baskets. You saw, especially in that first half, we weren’t going to let them beat us to those things.”
Rider doesn’t get the benefit of hanging out till Selection Sunday like Seton Hall. The Broncs’ season is over, once again in disappointing fashion after they were voted preseason favorites in the MAAC. Mervin James, who had 17 points and nine rebounds to lead the Broncs, had his college career come to an end.
That’s the danger of running into a team that knows you back to front, can pinpoint how you’ve beaten them before and can make the critical final adjustment to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
………
Good morning, and happy Friday to all.
I knew this week was going to be a whirlwind; I was at Madison Square Garden the past two days for the Big East tournament and I’m glad to be going back Saturday to cover the final for Field Level Media. The Ivy League tournament will come and go in a flash, and then we’ll all be sipping on St. Patrick’s Day shamrock shakes and watching the selection show.
This newsletter won’t be back until Monday morning, and from there it will probably be two editions a week to finish March. The number of New Jersey teams whose seasons are still alive has dwindled to three on the men’s side and three on the women’s (assuming Seton Hall makes the WNIT), so it’s only natural the updates slow down.
With that in mind, let’s clean the glass:
I don’t want to short-change Saint Peter’s by focusing mostly on Thursday’s losers. The Peacocks have had a fascinating season to get to this point, and for all the credit I’ve handed to Corey Washington in this newsletter, I really owe a lot more to Michael Houge. This guy had a double-double against Rutgers in November and turned in a few other all-around performances that made him the perfect complement to Washington and Latrell Reid. Come Thursday, he put up a season-high 20 points, eight rebounds and two blocks, including this one to seal the win. The juco transfer deserves his flowers.
Let me take a super-quick victory lap for picking this game correctly on Monday morning. Rider’s shortcomings in the MAAC tournament continue to vex and confuse the team’s fans and followers. With so many seniors about to leave, 2024-25 could be a rebuilding year in Lawrenceville.
The FDU women lost the NEC semifinal at Le Moyne 52-38. The two MAAC schools are also out of the running in the women’s bracket.
That said, here’s a viewing guide for New Jersey teams in their conference tourneys the rest of the week.
Princeton women vs. Penn, 4:30 p.m. today on ESPN+ (title game Saturday at 5 p.m. on ESPNews)
Monmouth women vs. Drexel, 5 p.m. today on FloHoops
Saint Peter’s men vs. Quinnipiac, 6:30 p.m. today on ESPNews (title game Saturday at 7:30 p.m. on ESPNU)
Princeton men vs. Brown, 11:00 a.m. Saturday on ESPNU (title game Sunday at noon on ESPN2)