Forty-minute efforts eluding Seton Hall, and time is running out
“We’re just not playing the way I’d like for us to play right now. We’re playing in spurts. Same way we practice – we practice in spurts, we play in spurts.”
PHILADELPHIA – There’s a word Shaheen Holloway uses frequently when describing how Seton Hall plays, and it’s not a word coaches love to have in their lexicon: spurts.
It happened as early as the second game of the season, when Seton Hall dismantled an overmatched Saint Peter’s team 80-44 but didn’t play as consistently as Holloway wanted.
“I don’t want to come off sounding crazy, but I don’t think we played that well,” Holloway said in his first answer of that postgame presser. “I think that we had some spurts where we played really good and I think some other times, we’ve got stuff we’ve got to work on.”
A totally fair assessment of a roster still very new to one another. More troubling when that’s the evaluation of a bubble team in mid-February.
The Pirates went 0-2 in two gettable games this week, losing at home to No. 23 Creighton after having a six-point lead and having a comeback fall short Saturday night at Villanova. In neither case was the team able to put a complete effort on the floor.
After Creighton: “I thought we played well for 34 minutes,” Holloway said. “I thought the last six minutes, we just lost our minds not playing disciplined.”
And now, in a 58-54 loss at Villanova, a troubling start.
“I thought we waited too late,” the first-year coach said. “I thought for the first 20-something minutes of the game, 28, 29, 30 minutes of the game, we didn’t play. Then once we started playing we was kind of right there, and then we kind of made some mistakes down the stretch and it cost us.
“We just got stagnant. We’re just not playing the way I’d like for us to play right now. We’re playing in spurts. Same way we practice – we practice in spurts, we play in spurts.”
The Pirates managed just 20 points and lost eight turnovers in the first half Saturday night, yet they were in shouting distance because of Villanova’s limitations on offense. They let two players beat them – Eric Dixon and Caleb Daniels had double-digit points before halftime – but contained the others, grabbed a few steals.
Hall clawed back with a 13-1 run in the second half that concluded with Al-Amir Dawes’ athletic hoop-and-harm with 9:31 to go. This trimmed the deficit down to 38-37.
But that’s where we saw the pivot point of this game: A defensive miscue let Brandon Slater waltz through the lane for a dunk, and Kadary Richmond’s bad pass on the next possession immediately turned into two more points to forge a 9-0 Villanova run.
“Coming back from that deficit just showed our resiliency,” Jamir Harris said. “We just lost focus slightly for a second there and that one second kind of hurt us.”
“Those are moments that are kind of killing us,” Holloway said of the sequence. “Every time we get in a game like this those moments kind of happen to us.”
To be fair, Seton Hall didn’t let up down the stretch, while Villanova absolutely did. It was trending to be a double-digit margin before Femi Odukale and Dawes knocked down consecutive 3-pointers. Then a poor decision by a Villanova player to foul helped the Pirates pull together seven points in the final 16 seconds, a bizarre end-of-game sequence that doesn’t need much more analysis.
But even if we want to be generous and give the Pirates credit there, add it up and it truly was about 10 minutes of game time that they played hard and focused as a unit.
The disappointing thing for Hall fans is the missed opportunity. This week wasn’t full of the cupcakes the Pirates had been beating recently like Butler and DePaul, nor was it the cream of the crop in the league. Two wins would have made them 17-9, 10-5 in the league, with a fourth Quad 1 win.
That looks a heck of a lot more like a greenlit tournament resume than the reality: 15-11, 8-7 Big East, 3-6 in Quad 1 games and 2-4 in Quad 2.
Holloway is not one for excuses, though he did point to the compact schedule in saying the Pirates had only one practice day to prepare for their first meeting with the Wildcats of the season.
“They run simple stuff but good, solid stuff,” he said. “You gotta prepare for their pass, pass, ball fake, shot fake, pivot, pivot. That stuff, you can’t do it in one day.”
But it was how he ended the press conference that I found most interesting, when he seemed to imply that simplifying the strategy might be in order.
“Listen man, at the end of the day you could put everything I just said out the window and you just gotta play basketball,” Holloway said. “Does it take a toll on you? Of course. But we got to play. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get back to the game plan, I’ll get back to the lab and stir something up and kinda figure out how to win on Tuesday.”
………
Thanks for stopping by mere hours before the Super Bowl, and condolences to Seton Hall fans that it wasn’t a more rewarding week. If it makes you feel any better, most of the state took an L on Saturday.
Expect Rutgers to drop right back out of the AP Top 25 poll after its 0-2 week on the road. A win at Illinois was in the Scarlet Knights’ grasp before a field goal drought of more than 10 ½ minutes, yielding a 19-0 Illinois run. I said this on Twitter, but the unreliable offense has become a much bigger concern these days, to the point that making it out of a 5-versus-12 or 6-versus-11 game in the Round of 64 is hardly a guarantee.
Princeton dropped into a tie for first place in the Ivy with an 83-76 loss at Dartmouth. Tosan Evbuomwan threatened a triple-double with 23 points, nine boards and six assists, but the Tigers had no answer for Dame Adelekun’s 25 on 10-of-14 shooting. In fact, the Big Green shot 50 percent, proving they have every intention of hanging around in the race to Ivy Madness. Yale has joined Princeton at 7-3 and owns the head-to-head tiebreaker for now, making this Saturday’s game at Jadwin massive. Yet the Tigers can’t overlook Friday’s contest against Brown, which won its third in a row to move to 6-4 and a surprise top-four spot in the league.
Fairleigh Dickinson lost a back-and-forth game against Central Connecticut 77-73, which dropped the Knights a half-game behind Merrimack and Stonehill into third in the Northeast. I corrected this in my Thursday post, though if you only read this in email form that wouldn’t have reached you: Merrimack and Stonehill are both still in their D1 transitions and won’t be eligible for the NCAA Tournament. NEC broadcaster and insider Ryan Peters informed me that Stonehill won’t compete in the conference tourney at all, but Merrimack will, based on a presidents’ vote. And if Merrimack wins it, the league’s NCAA bid will go to the tournament runner-up, NOT the regular-season champ as was the case with Bellarmine and the ASUN last year.
Monmouth’s four-game win streak came to an end in an 86-57 defeat to first-place Hofstra. The only New Jersey D1 men’s team to win, in fact, was NJIT, which beat Maine 65-50 for a season sweep. It might be too little too late for the Highlanders, though, as they’re 4-7 in the America East, good for seventh place of nine.
Women’s hoops didn’t treat N.J. much better. No. 15 Villanova routed Seton Hall 99-65 behind Maddy Siegrist’s season-high 50 points. That’s a season high for any D1 player, man or woman. She went 20-for-26 and added 10 rebounds for fun. If you’ve never seen her play, she’s dominant like that. She received a standing ovation at the Wells Fargo Center during the second half of the men’s game.
At least the Princeton women got by Dartmouth 64-47. The Tigers got some help from Penn, which beat Harvard. That knocked the Crimson out of the first-place tie and set up the top four like this: Princeton and Columbia 8-2, Penn and Harvard 7-3.