Holloway wants Seton Hall to ‘focus on us’ after beating Billmeier, NJIT
The Pirates showed incremental improvement in a win over Shaheen Holloway’s longtime colleague and friend Wednesday night.
NEWARK – Shaheen Holloway attended Grant Billmeier’s introduction as the head coach of NJIT two Aprils ago. Holloway even brought Seton Hall to NJIT’s Wellness and Events Center for a charity exhibition game before the 2023-24 season – a rare occasion for an America East Conference program to have a Power Five team in their building.
These are not just longtime Seton Hall colleagues, but friends, with Billmeier going as far as to call Holloway a mentor.
On Wednesday night, Billmeier made his return to the Prudential Center, where his Highlanders ran into a team that was tired of losing.
“Interesting experience coming here,” Billmeier said. “I’ve been in this building for 11 years as an assistant. I had no idea where the visiting locker room was. Took me a little while to figure out, just like it kinda took our guys a little while to figure out how hard Seton Hall was gonna play tonight.”
Seton Hall hardly played a perfect game, but with contributions from Prince Aligbe, Garwey Dual, Dylan Addae-Wusu and Isaiah Coleman, it felt like the Pirates made steps forward as they put away Billmeier’s Highlanders 67-56.
The Pirates bounded out to a 16-2 lead and were up 33-18 with five minutes left in the first half. Then their defense got out of sync, allowing NJIT to end the half on a 13-2 run and trim the deficit to four.
“I’m disappointed in the biggest way,” Holloway said. “I thought we played a good 15 minutes today in the first half and that was it. I thought we was gonna come out with more – we came out with juice, we came out with energy and then it kinda just dropped.
“Then we go in the locker room, we’re winning the game and I’ve got guys worried about them and not us winning. So that’s something that we’ve got to clean up and I’ve got to do a really, really, really good job of making people understand what playing at Seton Hall is all about.”
That was the first of about a dozen revelatory comments Holloway made at the microphone late Wednesday night.
It’s no secret this team has struggled on offense more than any other area. The Pirates needed players to shoot, and throughout November several of them weren’t stepping up.
Providence transfer Dual had 14 points on the season before Wednesday’s game, when he dropped 10 of his 11 points in a hot first half.
“For some reason, he just wasn’t being aggressive or looking to shoot,” Holloway said of Dual’s start to the year. “I told him that we need him to shoot, be aggressive. Because he looks to find people, but we were playing 3-on-5 some games because he wasn’t looking to shoot and Godswill (Erheriene) wasn’t looking to shoot so teams was keying in on all the guys.”
The best all-around performance, other than from NJIT star Tariq Francis (23 points), came from Aligbe, who shot 9-for-12 for a career-high 19 points and grabbed a game-high eight rebounds.
“He had a tough going because, Prince is a great person, but he overanalyzes everything,” Holloway said. “So when things happen or don’t happen, ‘This is why’ or ‘That’s why.’ Just play through it. I thought tonight he did a good job of just playing through it.”
When asked a nominally straightforward question about how a team can get its energy back up when it starts to dissipate, Holloway thought it over.
“What I really want to say, I can’t say,” he said. “It’s tough, it’s really tough, because… no, I’m gonna get in trouble, I won’t say anything. We just got to find a way. We just got to find a way, we’ve got to continue to keep boosting each other up. Things gotta continue to keep being positive and then not worry about anything else, but it’s tough.”
But tough may be how Holloway prefers it.
He said the message to his team after losing to Monmouth was to ignore the “noise,” and indicated to reporters that players were struggling with external criticism.
“Let’s just focus on us and who’s in that locker room and who’s in our program,” the coach said. “Don’t worry about the noise, don’t worry about what people are saying, what people are writing. Just continue to keep getting better as a team.
“Stop worrying about every little thing, stop worrying about what anybody’s saying and what they’re reading,” he went on to add. “I told the group, it’s tough, because there’s only one guy that’s from around here and that’s Dylan. So they’re not used to this type of pressure and used to this type of noise, and it’s getting to them. I told them, ‘Stop worrying about that. Let me handle that. I’ll take the bullets. I don’t care.’ It doesn’t matter. It’s funny, people think I forgot how to coach because of (how) things are going. I’m like, ‘Sure, whatever.’”
Billmeier certainly knows Holloway hasn’t lost his way or forgotten a thing.
I asked Billmeier what he made of Seton Hall’s season so far.
“They’re gonna be in every game,” he said. “I have no doubt that they’re gonna be in every game. His defense is tremendous. It’s just kind of the way things work in the transfer portal, it’s gonna take your offense a little longer to come. But I have no doubt with as hard as his teams play, with as much passion as he coaches with, I think they’re gonna have a great season.”
In turn, Holloway praised NJIT’s development in Year 2 under Billmeier.
“Grant and I worked together for a long time. He’s a great person, good coach, really good big man coach. But you’re seeing his growth as a head coach,” Holloway said. “His team is running really good stuff, he’s got two really good guards that’s gonna be very good in their league. Have I learned something from him? You know, I think as coaches we learn a lot from each other.”
Billmeier even shared that “there’s times when I’m thinking about losing my mind and I call him and he talks me off the ledge.” With how difficult the start to the season was for Seton Hall, you wonder if that may be a two-way street, two longtime colleagues commiserating about life as coaches in a player-driven era of the sport.
There was incremental improvement Wednesday night in terms of rebounding, scoring off turnovers and making a few more 2-pointers. Where this season goes next is still a mystery. The Pirates were fortunate to draw Oklahoma State, potentially the worst team in the Big 12 Conference, for the Big 12-Big East Battle. After Sunday’s game comes Rutgers, where the entire spotlight will be on RU’s freshmen. Then, suddenly, Big East play is here in 12 days.
Will the Pirates be ready for the leap in competition?
“I need everybody to be on the same page,” Holloway said. “I need the guys who could score, score. Guys who could defend, defend. Guys who could rebound, rebound. I think once we do that, I think we still got a good chance of being a good team.”
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Thanks for swinging by. Jerry Carino tweeted before Wednesday’s game that “it’s a night for die-hards.” Between the 8:30 start, the low-level opponent and the way Seton Hall had begun the season, that was an apt description, and the Rock looked about as empty as I used to see at Georgetown games back when I worked in Washington.
But I was glad to get out there and produce today’s newsletter, and now I won’t be back at the Prudential Center until the Never Forget Tribute Classic on Dec. 21, when Rutgers continues its rivalry series with Princeton. Coming up between now and then, I’ll be stopping by Rider, an FDU road game, one women’s game and, of course, the Garden State Hardwood Classic.
Let’s clean the glass, starting with some loose ends from Seton Hall-NJIT:
Billmeier didn’t hesitate when asked if he foresaw the game becoming an annual fixture: “I definitely think so. I think it makes sense. We’re able to take vans. And Sha doesn’t run from playing anybody. I definitely see it being an annual game.” The Pennington native who played for the Pirates from 2003-07 had another good line about the warm crowd reaction to his return: “I think they’re happy that I wasn’t representing Seton Hall because as a player they booed me a lot. Maybe they were happy to see me on the other team.”
Even after a decent shooting night, Seton Hall is making 40.6% of its 2-point attempts, ranking 355th in D1 according to KenPom and dead-last among power-conference teams. After going an abysmal 9-for-21 on layups and 0-for-1 on dunks against Monmouth, the Pirates were 12-for-26 on layups and 4-for-4 on dunks against NJIT. I posted late in the game that if the Pirates didn’t miss 10 layups each night they’d immediately be an average Power 5 team, and after sleeping on it, and factoring in the general strength of their defense, I stand by it.
If you didn’t hear by now, Xaivian Lee had the first triple-double on record in Princeton program history Tuesday night with 18 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists. The Tigers, now 7-3, probably don’t beat Saint Joseph’s without Lee’s efforts, especially considering his ninth and 10th assists (to Philip Byriel and Caden Pierce) turned a three-point game into a more comfortable margin in the final two minutes.
The MAAC season began Wednesday night with a standalone game: Rider at Fairfield. The Stags held on to win 78-75, but only after Rider came all the way back from a 59-45 deficit, with six different players scoring in the 23-8 surge that briefly put the Broncs in front. The Broncs had it tied 75-75 in the final seconds but couldn’t get a key rebound as Peyton Smith scored a putback and foul shot for the win. I’ll be in Lawrenceville Friday night to see if Rider will build on this performance in its MAAC home opener against Quinnipiac, the preseason league favorites who are an underwhelming 3-5.
Speaking of the MAAC, good win by Saint Peter’s the other night, beating Duquesne 62-59 in Pittsburgh. The Peacocks dropped their first three games – which included playing Seton Hall and Rutgers close – and have since won four straight, three on the road. Are these guys the team to beat in the MAAC this season? They open their conference slate at home against Manhattan on Friday.
FDU played Fordham close on Wednesday at Rose Hill, drawing within three in the second half before falling 84-75. The top two scorers were Terrence Brown (23) and Brayden Reynolds, who netted a career-high 16, so I wanted to plug my two FDU stories from earlier this year: On Reynolds’ unique bond with FDU coach Jack Castleberry as walk-ons turned scholarship guys, and on Brown and the behind-the-scenes story of how he landed at FDU.