Season preview: A new mix at Seton Hall could help ‘O’ catch up to ‘D’
Season preview: A new mix at Seton Hall could help ‘O’ catch up to ‘D’
Year Two of the Shaheen Holloway era sees a roster possibly better-constructed for the Big East gauntlet.
SOUTH ORANGE – Shaheen Holloway is never going to change who he is at his core: a coach who values defense, toughness and dedication. So there is no reason to expect his Seton Hall Pirates to flip their identity overnight, or in the span of a year.
What, then, is different for Holloway from Year 1 on the job at his alma mater to Year 2? In two words, more time.
“I just got a chance to breathe for a second,” Holloway said Friday.
Holloway was college basketball’s man of the hour in March and April 2022, when his NCAA Tournament run at Saint Peter’s flowed straight into a job offer from Seton Hall. He introduced a New York Jets draft pick in Las Vegas and threw out the first pitch at a Mets game. Then there was hard work to do, molding a roster that was graduating the likes of Jared Rhoden and Myles Cale.
“Everything was going 100 miles per hour. I got the job in April and there were four scholarship guys on the roster. I was trying to fill the roster and then just establish who I am and what I’m about with the team,” Holloway said. “This summer was good for us.”
This summer was flat-out necessary. Holloway has gotten a full offseason to build the 2023-24 roster through the transfer portal and good old-fashioned high school recruiting (Holloway got his first four-star, Isaiah Coleman, in May), then do what comes natural to him and get in the gym with his guys.
“It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Dylan Addae-Wusu told me. Neither was Saint Peter’s, I’d add.
Speaking with local reporters at the team’s media day Friday, Holloway said he thinks he’s put together a better shooting team. The Pirates ranked 10th of 11 in the Big East in scoring (68.4 ppg) and 3-point shooting (32.5%) a season ago. They were last (68.6%) at the foul line.
Addae-Wusu, among other skills, brings this to the program. His 43 3-pointers made at St. John’s last year would have ranked second on Seton Hall, and he’s averaged 37.2% from the arc over his past two seasons.
But he can also be a wrecking ball driving to the basket, he’s tough on D and most importantly, he represents something the roster did not have tons of: experience in the Big East.
“The Big East is one of the toughest and one of the best conferences in the country right now,” Addae-Wusu said. “Being able to be here at Seton Hall, close to home, great coach in Coach Sha and the coaching staff, and yeah, I get to play in one of the best leagues in the country.”
Holloway is known to play three and occasionally four guards on the floor at a time – Addae-Wusu, 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds, was told he could man the 1 through the 4 at Seton Hall – so expect to see some of the young guys roll in as well, mixing and matching with seniors Kadary Richmond and Al-Amir Dawes. As soon as they’re healthy.
“The freshmen kind of hit the wall already,” Holloway said, adding that none of their injuries are serious. “But Isaiah (Coleman) has been out a while with a sore groin, so has Malachi (Brown). I feel awful for our big guy, Arda (Ozdogan), the Turkish guy. He’s been here a month and he’s had a broken nose and a high ankle sprain. Welcome to America, right?”
Coleman, the 6-foot-5 freshman from Northern Virginia, told us he only missed one practice and he feels good to go. I asked him what it’s like so far playing for Holloway, a star guard in his day who has an affinity for the backcourt.
“Only thing I can do is listen. He knows what he’s talking about,” Coleman said. “On the floor, off the floor, he knows what he’s talking about.”
Holloway has seen a big jump from the newcomers since they arrived at campus in June. The area of most intrigue for me was the center position; in April, I pointed out they had no bigs on next year’s roster, this after Seton Hall started 6-foot-6 KC Ndefo at the five most of the season.
Both Jaden Bediako and Elijah Hutchins-Everett were alluded to in that edition of the newsletter as potential solutions, and both wound up transferring in from Santa Clara and Austin Peay, respectively. Then they added aforementioned Turk Arda Ozdogan and 6-foot-10 Boise State transfer Sadraque NgaNga.
Bediako (6-foot-10) and Hutchins-Everett (6-foot-11) are the leading candidates for minutes at the five, and the Pirates hope iron is sharpening iron down under the basket.
“Everybody has a great skill set,” Hutchins-Everett said, pointing out Ozdogan played against older competition in Europe and Bediako went up against Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s for four years. “We just continue to make each other better. We all do certain stuff differently, so that helps out big-time for the team.”
When I asked Holloway what they bring that he didn’t have last year, he described Bediako as reminiscent of the physical, old-school Big East centers, whereas Hutchins-Everett has skill and a better outside shot. (He scored in double figures in both his seasons at Austin Peay and shot 20-for-62 from three last year.)
“I think that’s true to some extent,” Bediako said of the evaluation. “It’s good, like I said, just guarding around the perimeter more. He can shoot the ball. So I kind of know where to work my game, but that’s what I’ve learned about my role. I kind of know where to work my game, where my spots are as a player.
“But it’s great because when I get to the next level, I’m gonna play guys like Elijah, too, with more skill. It’s good, I think it really complements both too. One of us can go in and bruise a guy, and then the other guy can come in, bruise him up again.”
It isn’t just about the newcomers. By my count, Seton Hall returns 36.53% of its minutes from last year and a mere 28.26% of its rebounding, but 41.58% of its scoring.
That’s thanks in large part to Richmond, who averaged 10.1 points over 27 games but missed the end of the season with a back injury; Dawes, the Pirates’ biggest outside threat who also facilitated well in his first season with the program; and Dre Davis, the team’s leading scorer for part of last season before Dawes took the mantle, whose campaign was also interrupted by injury.
The Pirates had a gauntlet of a closing stretch to the regular season and could have used at least two more Big East wins to help their postseason resume. But Holloway put his opinion succinctly: “If he (Richmond) doesn’t get hurt, I think we’re in the NCAA Tournament last year.”
Does Richmond agree? “I feel like we were on a good stretch till I went down,” he said.
A litany of leading men – Myles Powell, Sandro Mamukelashvili, Jared Rhoden – have come through the door for Hall in recent seasons. Not just the go-to guys on offense, they were the ones everyone around them looked up to. Last season, post-Rhoden, Tyrese Samuel was probably the Pirates’ vocal leader, but now he is off to Florida. Richmond opening up as a leader in his senior season could take this team a long way.
“I’m just glad that I could help the guys that’s around here with whatever they need,” Richmond said. “And I’m taking on the role of being the most-known or most familiar and I like what comes with it. I appreciate all the support I’m getting – even the hate, too.”
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Happy Monday, and thanks for stopping by. We’re rolling right along with the preseason tour, which stops at Princeton later today. Stay tuned for more mid-majors going under the microscope now that we’ve already spent some time on Rutgers and Seton Hall.
Let’s clean the glass with a few stray notes and observations:
I asked a few players how hard they go at practice under Holloway and his staff. Loved Bediako’s response, as he leaned into my recorder with a bit of a wry smile to say, “We go very hard. We go very hard. Every day, even after an off day, we’re still going hard. It’s cool, it’s a different mindset than I had at my last school.” Bediako, the brother of Alabama star-turned-NBA player Charles Bediako, will be intriguing to watch this season.
Holloway was asked what the transfer portal was like, tangibly speaking – how it works, what it looks like for coaches logging on to search for players to recruit. The coach gave a predictably thoughtful answer (you can read it in full here) that sets the backdrop for where a smaller, private, non-football school like Seton Hall falls in the greater landscape. In part: “You’ve got to get guys that fit who you are and what you’re about, right? You can’t just go out and get the best guys in the portal because that’s not realistic. That’s not life, especially with name, image and likeness. Everybody wants to get paid, I’ll be honest with you guys. Everybody wants to get paid, everybody wants to go somewhere that’s not a fit anymore. It's ‘How much can you pay me?’”
Over at Rutgers, Dylan Harper took his official visit on Saturday. We’re going to find out together if an Instagram post embeds smoothly in a Substack or if it’s going to give me Twitter-esque problems:
Harper got to see a fourth-quarter comeback keyed by defense and special teams as Rutgers got past Michigan State 27-24 on homecoming day.
I have absolutely zero secret intel about this (and I’d caution people to mind Harper’s choice of hashtag, #notcommitted), but the Harper-to-Rutgers vibes feel strong. It’s not only about going where his brother played, where his grandmother can watch his home games. He is good friends with Ace Bailey, the No. 3 prospect in the class who he played with at Rucker Park last summer. Bailey, a Rutgers commit, took his official visit together with Harper. That’s yet another valuable person in Harper’s ear recruiting the star guard to Piscataway.