Seton Hall needs more than Super Kadary to win Big East games
Kadary Richmond isn't going to finish 28-9-5 every night, which is bad news for a Seton Hall team that isn’t stacking up in a handful of key areas.
NEWARK – There’s two major differences between Kadary Richmond’s previous career best of 27 points and Saturday’s personal record-setting 28.
One: When Richmond scored 27 against UConn last season, the rest of his line in the box score was barren. Three steals, sure, but just one rebound and one assist.
This year’s Pirates team is composed much differently, and more is being asked of Richmond in his role. He zipped around the court Saturday against Providence, turned defense into offense and led the Pirates with nine rebounds and five assists. It was the best all-around individual performance a Seton Hall player has posted in the past couple of seasons.
Two: Unlike last January against UConn, Saturday’s performance came in a loss.
Richmond has tantalizing potential that wows anyone in the building whenever it fully emerges. But he isn’t going to finish 28-9-5 every night, which is bad news for a Seton Hall team that isn’t stacking up in a handful of key areas.
“It’s a team effort so I can’t really be too high or too low,” Richmond said postgame. “I gotta stay level-headed and help my guys any way I can on and off the court.”
Richmond tends to play up to the quality of Seton Hall’s opponent. His previous best night of the season – 17 points, 5-of-9 shooting, five rebounds, five assists – came at top-10 Kansas. Last year’s breakout against UConn was a home conference game in which both teams entered 10-3; he made the go-ahead layup through a hard foul with 31 seconds left in overtime.
The question about Richmond has always been whether he can maintain his level of aggression and go win Seton Hall some points night in, night out.
“He played hard, he was aggressive,” coach Shaheen Holloway said Saturday. “As long as he’s aggressive and he’s healthy, I think that’s the guy that everybody was anticipating seeing and the things he could do, as long as he continues to be aggressive and stay healthy.”
But as we saw Saturday, Richmond alone isn’t enough to power this Seton Hall group to wins in the Big East, even if the conference is having a down year.
KC Ndefo, the three-time MAAC Defensive Player of the Year before transferring to Seton Hall, pointed to that end of the court in explaining what the Pirates had to do to support Richmond.
“When he has it going like that I feel like our offense just clicks and flows,” Ndefo said. “We gotta just help him on the defense by getting more stops, and once he has it like that on offense our team is gonna be good.”
But Seton Hall’s defense has been this team’s identity, not its weakness. The Pirates held a high-flying Providence offense to 71 points on, by my calculation, 72 possessions.
That leads us to the three most critical areas to improve if Seton Hall wants to be a contender:
Shooting
The stats say: Seton Hall ranks second-to-last in the Big East in field-goal percentage (43.0%) and last in 3-point shooting (30.3%).
The solution: There were other scoring threats for Richmond to collaborate with last season in the form of Jared Rhoden and, until his head injury, Bryce Aiken. And last year’s group was not so thin in the post (more on that in a moment).
This season, Clemson transfer and Newark native Al-Amir Dawes stands as the leading scorer (11.0 ppg) and the best 3-point shooter among guards (41.9%). His teammates already trust him: Dawes took the Pirates’ last shot down three with six seconds Saturday, and he failed to connect. He said later that the play was drawn up for anybody who was open, and he had a clean look.
“It wasn’t a good shooting day for me,” Dawes said after going 3-for-11 for eight points. “Things like that happen so you just gotta move on and get ready for the next game.”
It needs to be a better shooting day soon for Jamir Harris, who scored the game’s first bucket on a mid-range shot and spent the rest of the day shooting 1-of-8, all from three.
“He’s a good shooter,” Holloway said of Harris. “Once he gets back in the lab and gets some repetition in, I’m sure he’s going to knock those shots down.”
Tray Jackson converted his only 3-point attempt of the game and is 6-for-14 from the arc for the season. He continues to impress me in small doses, but the Pirates don’t look to him as an option to get going early in games.
The post
The stats say: Seton Hall is 5-1 when outrebounding its opponent and 1-4 when it doesn’t. (It was a 30-30 push in the Rutgers win.)
The solution: Perform some sort of healing miracle on Alexis Yetna’s knee. The 6-foot-8 forward is not due back until January at the earliest as he recovers from a knee injury.
Yetna was Seton Hall’s leading rebounder last season with 7.6 per game, which brought his career average to 8.4 per game following two seasons for South Florida. It was a pleasant surprise when Hall fans found out Yetna would return for one more season instead of going pro overseas. But without him, Seton Hall is down four of its top five rebounders from last season (Yetna, Rhoden, Ike Obiagu, Myles Cale).
Holloway started three forwards Saturday – a rare move for the former point guard. Freshman Tae Davis got his first career start alongside Tyrese Samuel and Ndefo. The coach had to get creative due to guard Femi Odukale’s injury, and he understood what the Providence frontcourt duo of Bryce Hopkins and Ed Croswell could bring.
With 3:24 left in the first half, Samuel joined Davis and Ndefo on the bench with two fouls, and that foul trouble continued into the second half, limiting Samuel to just 10 minutes and four points. Hopkins and Croswell combined for 32 points in the second half; Seton Hall as a team had 31. And the Friars won the rebounding battle 38-33, including 10 offensive boards.
Turnovers
The stats say: The Pirates lose 15.7 turnovers per game, ranking 329th in Division I and worst in the Big East. In turnover percentage, calculated as turnovers / possessions, they rank 337th at 22.4%, according to KenPom.
The solution: This is where my basketball knowledge hits its limit. I could be a smartass and say, “Stop doing that,” but if it were that easy the Pirates would have fixed it already.
When you watch this Seton Hall team enough, you see plenty of poor decisions with the ball – cross-court passes that don’t get high enough, things of that sort. It’s cliché, but if the Pirates stop trying to do too much, simplify the offense and take good shots instead of passing in hopes of a better one, it might actually solve two of the three problems on this list.
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Thanks for checking out this rare Sunday edition of the newsletter. I felt like knocking this out before Saturday afternoon’s results got too stale. Let’s tie things up by cleaning the glass with stray notes and observations from the weekend:
The Pirates’ next two games are on the road against teams that might be ranked in the AP Top 25 before we know it: Xavier on Tuesday and Marquette the Tuesday after. Xavier isn’t strong defensively but put up 102 points at Georgetown for its fifth straight win. Marquette became the latest team to beat a Creighton team we all agree is diminished, but bear in mind the Golden Eagles’ three losses came by five at Purdue, by three to unbeaten Mississippi State and by three to Wisconsin, all ranked teams now. And they embarrassed top-10 Baylor. An 0-3 start for Hall in Big East play wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
While the Pirates can always point to their New Jersey bragging rights won just last week, I’m left with no doubt that Rutgers is the better team overall. The Scarlet Knights shot 58.5 percent and forced 22 turnovers to obliterate Wake Forest 81-57 Saturday. They only needed to utilize an eight-man rotation to do so, with five scoring in double figures. “I thought that they physically overwhelmed us, especially in the beginning of the first half and the second half,” Wake coach Steve Forbes told reporters. “I thought that’s where the game got out of hand for us.”
Cam Spencer deserves a shoutout. He faced the press after the Seton Hall loss and talked about his poor shooting night (2-for-7, 0-for-4 from three) but took it in stride and said he had to keep shooting. Saturday’s line: 5-for-5 from the floor, 2-for-2 from deep, 3-for-3 from the foul line for 15 points – in just 19 minutes! Spencer is still averaging 2.7 steals per game, to boot. If Big Ten Newcomer of the Year weren’t a freshman-focused award, Spencer could be a prime candidate to lock it up.
Princeton did what Princeton so often proves it can do and mounted a big second-half comeback Friday night against Delaware, cutting an 18-point deficit with 12ish minutes left down to a single point. Delaware pulled away on late free throws to win 76-69, giving the Tigers their second straight loss. Delaware’s next game just so happens to be a second straight in Mercer County, as the Blue Hens visit Rider on Monday. Rider has played just eight games thus far, the lowest of any N.J. team, and none since beating Stonehill on Dec. 7.