From preseason lasagna to late-game huddles, Seton Hall built to grind out wins
Kevin Willard said he tends to “blame COVID for everything.” But his program found a way to create something useful out of something dreadful.
NEWARK – A seasoned Big East coach, Kevin Willard sounded like a man far wiser than his 46 years as he spoke Wednesday. Seton Hall had squeezed out a 66-60 home win over Butler, its second close win in as many games, with his players giving off the impression that they were made to grind out tight battles.
Admitting he tends to “blame COVID for everything,” Willard explained one silver lining, of sorts. If not a silver lining, a way he and his program extracted something useful out of something dreadful.
The context: COVID-19 spread through the program in September, before Omicron and before the season tipped off. As Willard tells it, “everyone got sick, and everybody was just together” out of necessity. So he changed some of the team’s operations, including how his players ate – not in terms of diet, but location.
“I moved everybody up into my offices,” Willard said. “I made them come up to my offices, and (we) got all our meals catered up there all the way up until last month, I think, because I was getting tired of having lasagna all over my carpet.
“I’m the first one in the office... and I would be cleaning up from the meal the night before. I finally lost my mind.”
Lasagna on the carpet is a small price to pay if it helps a veteran team (22nd in the country in average experience, per KenPom.com) build that intangible chemistry that many teams seek, but only a handful actually replicate.
“I said, ‘It’s a new team, let’s all get together, bring them up into the office so they can eat with us, eat with the staff,’” Willard said. “... The guys liked it, so we kept doing it, and sometimes meals are the best way to talk, bust balls.”
Obstacles are everywhere. Plenty of teams had COVID-19 outbreaks and schedule disruptions; Seton Hall isn’t the only team to lose a key contributor like Bryce Aiken to injury, either. But not every team finds ways to stick together and respond.
“I think it takes grit, it takes a united group, a group that believes in each other and is willing to fight for each other,” Jamir Harris said. “And I feel like there’s no team better than us at that. We genuinely care for one another, on and off the court. We love each other, and on that court we show that.”
Wednesday’s first half was back-and-forth, frankly ugly basketball. After Jared Rhoden hit an early 3-pointer, the Pirates couldn’t get another to fall for about 17 minutes, try as they might. Through air balls and defensive lapses, both teams looked worn down (it was Butler’s third game in six nights).
Seton Hall moved Harris to the point after Kadary Richmond (16 minutes) spent everything he had left in the tank. Still recovering from a non-COVID illness, Richmond spent four days in bed, according to Willard, so his conditioning wasn’t fully back.
Harris answered the call, with 10 points, four assists, a pair of giant threes to cap a game-defining 20-2 run in the second half and two late free throws to ice it.
Still, it was no blowout. Butler pulled together a 13-0 run to guarantee another grind-it-out ending for Seton Hall, not unlike Saturday against DePaul.
“We worked two days with Jamir running the show and thought he did a great job getting us to that 16-point lead,” Willard said. “The next evolution for him is gonna be how to manage that 16-point lead a little bit better. But I was proud of not only the way he played offensively, but the way he played defensively.”
“Our huddles were very tight,” Harris added. “We just talked about staying the course. Once we got one shot to go, we just went on that run. I just attest that to our chemistry.”
Altogether, the result is Seton Hall’s fifth win in seven games, pulling it into solo sixth place in this challenging iteration of the Big East. All that’s left is a visit to Xavier, the final home game against winless Georgetown and a finale at Creighton, which is playing like one of the three best teams in the league lately.
Willard shot down someone’s question about the closing three-game stretch. Rhoden, the Pirates’ vocal leader all season, put it best.
“I think one of the most important things was that, when we won tonight, nobody was too excited,” Rhoden added. “It was like we expected to win tonight. We’re expecting to continue to win, and I think that’s a good thing moving forward. We’re not getting too high on wins now. I think that’s big time.”
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Thank you for reading. Let’s quickly clean the glass and take our next step toward the weekend.
One more word about Hall: What a terrific game for Tyrese Samuel. I didn’t think it would be at first, not as he (and some of his teammates) let Butler sparkplug Bo Hodges fly in for very easy layups in the early going. But his 15 points marked his best scoring performance against a Big East opponent, ensuring Rhoden wouldn’t have to do everything on his own. That 20-2 spree in the second half doesn’t happen if Samuel doesn’t start it like this:
Samuel told me it felt like his dunk woke up the crowd and “gave us that little oomph” the Pirates needed. “The prior games I wasn’t in my zone,” Samuel added. “Today was one of those days I felt like I was back to where I was pre-COVID. I’m just going to take it one game at a time and see how I progress forward from here.”
Michigan 71, Rutgers 62. No shame in losing by single digits on the road in the Big Ten. There was no telling what the Wolverines were going to look like in their first game after Juwan Howard’s five-game suspension; they also did not have Moussa Diabate or Terrance Williams II. But most of Michigan’s starters shot 50 percent or close enough to it, neutralizing the nice games Ron Harper Jr. and Cliff Omoruyi were able to have. It’s now two straight losses for Rutgers, but I think any bubble concerns are low unless the Scarlet Knights lose either to a spectacularly flawed Indiana team or to Penn State at home in the season finale.
Monmouth’s 71-59 win over Siena might be its best win of the season, even counting the Cincinnati and Pittsburgh victories. Certainly, it’s the Hawks’ biggest conference win to date. Nikkei Rutty had a career-high 19 rebounds and Monmouth built a 34-19 halftime lead by causing Siena some less-than-ideal shots throughout the game. A big Jersey-on-Jersey battle comes Friday at West Long Branch against Saint Peter’s; the Hawks, Peacocks and Saints are all tied at 10-6 in conference. I wish I could be there in person for that one, but TV will have to do.
Finally, a nice epilogue for my Princeton women’s hoops story from last time. In Wednesday’s game in New York, Princeton (11-0 in the Ivy League) appeared to have its toughest Ivy matchup yet against Columbia (10-1), with the crowd not on their side, to boot. Final: Tigers 73, Lions 53. Kaitlyn Chen had a pretty nice game for the Tigers when I watched them manhandle Yale, but she was out of her mind against Columbia with 27 points on 11-for-20 shooting. I’ll leave you with what coach Carla Berube told me about Chen (who’s only a sophomore, playing her first season) that didn’t make my final cut Monday:
“She’s a smart player. She reads the floor well, she reads her teammates well, (her) defense. A really quick first step. She changes her speed really well. It’s hard to guard that. She can pull up and she can go by. She makes the help defender commit, and she can dump it off when the defender comes. I think she’s made a lot of strides with her defense, and with that being the first line of defense as the point guard, it’s such a really important position. She’s really worked hard at it and grown a lot over the season and become a really tough defender.”