Column: On a Seton Hall season to forget
I have to wonder what has gone through Shaheen Holloway's mind from November to now.
NEWARK – Late in the first half Wednesday night, Dylan Addae-Wusu nearly added to an impressive 16-point total when he got to the rim for a layup. The ball spun around every part of the rim before finally dripping off the wrong side. But Addae-Wusu kept it away from Villanova’s would-be rebounders by batting it out to the arc, where Isaiah Coleman knocked down a three.
It qualifies as one of the best sequences of the season for Seton Hall, which has enjoyed so few hustles plays like that. It contributed to a 33-21 halftime edge, and the Pirates led by as many as 16 early in the second.
In hindsight, we should have known the Pirates wouldn’t be ahead for long. They’re a team that, among other things, can’t put two halves together. If the first half was sweet, the second was destined to go sour.
Fast-forward through a half in which Seton Hall shot 7-of-29 (24.1 percent) while allowing Eric Dixon to take over the game at the other end, and the Pirates dropped to 7-21 and 2-15 in the Big East with a 59-54 loss to rival Villanova.
This was the last Seton Hall game I will cover this season, and I get to say I was in attendance for eight of these games (including the Big East wins, which both required overtime). They aren’t media credentials I’ll save in a box of mementos, to put it one way.
In four years of writing this newsletter, these Pirates were certainly the worst high-major team I’ve covered (and probably could make a case for the worst overall, counting all the NJITs and Saint Peter’s of the world). It’s no longer close between 2024-25 Seton Hall and 2023-24 Rutgers. Fun fact: Seton Hall has the worst effective field goal percentage in high-major hoops (44.7%, 355th in the country), just as Rutgers had the worst high-major eFG last year.
And even though that Rutgers team was actually even more inept at shooting the ball at 43.5%, 357th in the nation, at least they managed to win seven Big Ten games. Seton Hall has fielded a patently ugly offense and it can’t get enough stops to stay competitive.
How would you rank the five biggest lowlights of this season? I’m probably forgetting something, but it looks something like this:
5. Falling 66-63 to your biggest rival, Rutgers, after leading most of the game at their place when a star player you could never afford in the current NIL landscape knocks down a buzzer-beater over your best defender.
4. Getting spanked 74-57 at DePaul, a moribund program that hadn’t beaten a Big East foe by more than 10 points since March 2, 2022.
3. Losing 63-51 at home to Monmouth, which had played eight games and lost all eight before Nov. 30 even rolled around. Instead of being tired, Abdi Bashir Jr. and company looked energized. With hindsight we know the Hawks have become a very capable basketball team, but this day was the true turning point for Seton Hall fans, who watched the Pirates clank half their 16 free throws and started booing the misses.
2. Having your rival poach Kadary Richmond, bring Richmond into your building and beat you by nearly 30, only for Rick Pitino to declare afterward that Richmond would still be playing for Seton Hall if the money was equal.
1. It’s got to be the 57-56 loss to Fordham in Walsh Gymnasium way back on Nov. 9, setting the tone for the season. A game the Pirates could have won but choked away when Addae-Wusu, surely the player on the floor with the most high-major college basketball experience, failed to catch a pass to beat the press before Fordham hit a three at the buzzer. It was Seton Hall’s first loss in a buy game since 2013 and its first loss in Walsh since 1989. Fordham was picked second-to-last in the A-10 preseason poll and is currently… last in the A-10.
Shaheen Holloway, a self-described sore loser, has suffered through it all, and I have to wonder what has gone through his mind from November to now. He broke his wrist in the middle of Game 1; in terms of getting through to your players, where else can you go emotionally from there?
Unlike last year, when the Pirates hit the jackpot on key transfers like Jaden Bediako, this year’s crop was a bust. But asking him in early February what personnel choices he’d like to do over, as NJ.com did, is the wrong line of questioning. What did he try behind the scenes to get his messages and through to this group? Did he work to evolve his own coaching methods?
We often made excuses for this team, chiefly on the dual fronts of injuries and lack of NIL money. But everyone has injuries, and Holloway was never going to complain about the player budget. He did lean into the former (“I come to practice and I don’t know who’s practicing [due to injuries and illnesses] … What you thought is your practice plan now has to change because those guys are not in. It’s been like that for two months”), and his grievances progressed from guys who only want to play for stats to the Big East scheduling too many Saturday-Tuesday turnarounds.
If I were just a Seton Hall fan, I would have stopped caring about this year’s team more than a month ago. Even in the confines of this newsletter, I haven’t bothered laying into Yacine Toumi for being a bust, for example, because Toumi won’t be back next year. Building something for the future is far more interesting to me. And whichever players come and go, Holloway and his staff will be back next year.
Don’t get me wrong, he absolutely deserves to be – he won an NIT title in Year 2, he should have been in the NCAA Tournament, and the Seton Hall administration surely recognizes this roster was indeed overmatched. I just wonder what the coach may take from this lost season, or if he’ll try to blot it out from his memory, like everyone else.
………
Thanks for sticking around. I’m sure Hall fans in particular would rather do anything else than read about this team, but we’ve made it to the end of the road.
Let’s clean the glass with a few other thoughts I had about some upcoming games:
I appreciate the reception my piece on Abdi Bashir Jr. has gotten. Here’s a link if you missed it. Now, to zoom out from the individual to the team: Monmouth’s coming! The Hawks’ 1-10 start to the season probably threw most of us off the scent. They played a very overmatched nonconference schedule, sure, but they’ve also gotten gradually better week by week. Now they’ve won six of eight games and John Fanta is visiting their building for CBS Sports Network, proclaiming them the dark horse of the CAA. A truly massive home finale tonight for Monmouth against Elon, which is one game behind in the standings but more than 100 spots higher in the KenPom ratings. Then, once the Hawks close the regular season Saturday at Drexel, we’ll know exactly where they’ll be seeded in the conference tourney – and how the potential path to a dark-horse championship might look.
Am I mistaken to be ever so slightly bullish about Rutgers now? To be clear, I’m not entertaining hypothetical paths to an at-large NCAA bid; I declared that dream dead more than two weeks ago, no take-backs. But consecutive high-scoring wins have all but ensured the Scarlet Knights won’t miss the Big Ten tourney, and now they can work on improving their seed. Michigan just scored 49 the other night (in a win!). You don’t think Rutgers – now much healthier than it was in a three-point loss to the Wolverines Feb. 1 – has a chance tonight? The next game is at Purdue, who’s in free fall, and Steve Pikiell has led teams into both those buildings and won.
Without making anything official, I believe I’ll have a treat in store for conference tourney week, something I’ve never done before: Five newsletters in five days. How does that sound for a crescendo to Selection Sunday? The logistics are still a work in progress, some of it depending on how certain teams fare in the next week and a half. But for all the challenges of 2024-25, I think I’d like to do something different to end Season 4 of Guarden State with a bang.