What Rider learned on its seven-game trip to start the season
The Broncs went 4-0 against the mid- and low-majors on their schedule but lost by a combined 84 to UCLA, Iowa and Villanova.
VILLANOVA, Pa. – Wednesday’s 72-48 loss to Villanova marked the end of a seven-game journey for Rider that took up most of November.
But this Thanksgiving morning, the Broncs are at practice. With another game Saturday, and plenty to improve upon, they don’t have a choice.
Rider played two games in three days in Southern California to kick off the new season. The team spent time in Baltimore and Annapolis to face Coppin State and Navy. Then came Iowa, and finally shorter drives into Pennsylvania to tussle with Bucknell and Villanova.
When Rider coach Kevin Baggett met with reporters in October, he felt that his team wasn’t ready for what was ahead, especially with so many newcomers assimilating into the program. The Broncs had a similar three-week stretch early last season – the trips included Marquette, Nebraska, Duquesne and Maryland – but little carryover from that roster to this one.
“Some of this is not by design,” Baggett said. “I have to raise money for the university, right? So some of it is not because I want to play this schedule, some of it is because I’m a team player and want to help out the university and the university’s been great to me. I have to say that because last year people didn’t understand why I was playing that schedule.”
At the finish line of this lengthy string of road games, Rider is 4-3. The Broncs went 4-0 against the mid- and low-majors on their schedule but lost by a combined 84 to UCLA, Iowa and Villanova.
The record is about as good as the program could have hoped for, but Baggett and the Broncs are far from satisfied after an uncompetitive loss to the Wildcats on Thanksgiving eve.
“I know we obviously can compete against the mid-level guys, but we’ve got to be able to compete (in) these games when we plan,” Baggett said Wednesday. “We have to show up, we have to execute, we’ve got to take care of the ball. And then, you know, tonight these guys made every shot, which they hadn’t been doing that, so give those guys credit. And when you allow so many guys to be open, I mean they’re going to make shots, so we just need to do a better job of not giving so many open looks.”
Villanova – often vulnerable against opponents it’s “supposed” to beat in the Kyle Neptune era – drilled 15 of 38 3-pointers against Rider. A Broncs win wasn’t out of the question when they trailed only 23-20 with less than five minutes in the first half, but Villanova scored the next 16 points and held Rider scoreless for 5:45 spanning the first and second halves.
The Broncs were ice cold on offense to start the second half and a string of seven made shots late in the game barely made a dent in the margin. Baggett called it the team’s worst showing of the three high-major games.
“Our effort was not good tonight, start there,” he said. “We just didn’t do anything right to be honest with you. So it starts with me, and everybody’s accountable for this loss.”
The chief problem cropping up for Rider is ball control. Win or lose, the Broncs have committed double-digit turnovers in every game. They fumbled it away 17 times against Iowa and matched that number against Villanova, although it was on pace to be much worse with 12 turnovers coming in the first half. These were almost entirely bad passes and loose balls, indicating a lack of connectedness on offense and possibly court awareness issues.
“Our guards got to take care of the ball,” Baggett said. “They got to execute. They got to get us in our offense better. We’ve got to move the ball. We were trying to do too much one-on-one. When you do that, too many turnovers happen doing that.”
Rider’s top scorer Wednesday was freshman Flash Burton, the backup point guard, who got his work done in the midrange and on some drives for a solid 15 points. That was in stark contrast to starter Ruben Rodriguez, who couldn’t get anything going either individually or for his teammates.
In a telling move, Rider’s initial lineup for the second half featured four starters and Burton in place of Rodriguez. Asked if he’s considering starting Burton Saturday in the home opener against Delaware, Baggett only said, “We’ll see. I’m not sure yet.”
Burton, a Philadelphia native, said it meant a lot to play a game at Finneran Pavilion. As for the halftime locker room?
“We still had our heads up. We were just ready to come out, play harder, knock down shots,” Burton said. “We just couldn’t get our shooters open.
“There’s nothing any team has done,” he added later. “It’s basically us, we’re beating ourselves right now.”
To be sure, there were several positives for Rider to take from the wins on this trip. In the first win, at San Diego, the Broncs got in front by one point in a back-and-forth affair and then locked down their opponents for the final 1:15 to preserve a 68-67 win.
They handled a bad Coppin State team before hitting another gear on offense against Navy. Jay Alvarez (five threes, 19 points), T.J. Weeks Jr. (18 points), Burton (16) and Ife West-Ingram (14 points, seven rebounds, six assists) were all firing at the same time, and Rider made 10 of 19 3-pointers, an outlier through seven games.
Here are two quick highlight selections from that game, illustrating an offense that knows how to do what it’s struggled with more recently – finding space in transition, and making the extra pass.
So the Broncs are back in the lab this morning, likely working on these pain points even if they “flushed” the Villanova film. A usually solid Delaware program looms in two days, and then the MAAC season kicks off with a rare Wednesday trip to Fairfield and a Friday home date with league favorite Quinnipiac.
I asked Burton what I asked Baggett: What did you learn about your team from this seven-game road trip?
“We mainly learned that, by the time March comes, we’re going to be ready,” Burton said. “This is going to be set. We’re going to be ready.”
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Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones!
Thanks for joining me here, whether on Turkey Day or whichever day you open this newsletter. We’re almost one full month into the college basketball season. Storylines for teams around the state are crystallizing, and for me on Wednesday, seeing Finneran Pavilion for the first time outweighed the fact that it was a snoozer of a game.
I’ll blast out this reminder again Saturday, and on social media soon enough, but the arrival of December means I’ll begin to paywall the early-week edition of Guarden State for paying subscribers only. These will sometimes be Monday, sometimes Tuesday this year. The Thursday edition and weekend edition will always remain free to read. But giving you a fair warning now. To kick that off this Monday, I’ll have a column going into greater detail about Rutgers’ wild week in Atlanta and Las Vegas.
For now, let’s hit Rutgers and a few other key items in Cleaning the Glass…
The Scarlet Knights are going to play No. 20 Texas A&M in the fifth-place game of the Player Era Festival on Saturday after going 1-1 against Notre Dame and Alabama. I recapped the heart-stopping Rutgers-Notre Dame game the other night for Field Level Media; all I’ll say is I filed that story a few minutes before 2 a.m. here on the East Coast, and you can’t deny Rutgers got lucky that a freshman fouled Harper with the game tied in OT. Dylan Harper followed that 36-point showing with 37 against No. 9 Alabama, and Ace Bailey improved from Game 1 to Game 2, but the Scarlet Knights shot just 2-for-13 from three and were always a step behind in a 95-90 loss. (Beating the Irish by one point hurt Rutgers’ KenPom rating; losing close to a great Alabama team boosted RU by five spots to 72.)
The New Jersey game of the month has to be Saint Peter’s over FDU, 78-76 on Tuesday at the Bogota Savings Bank Center, a game I wish I could have covered live. FDU scores 40 on the Peacocks in the first half (for context, Seton Hall had 32) and leads by as many as 13. Saint Peter’s surges back in the second half and ultimately takes a 76-61 lead in the last two minutes. Ahmed Barba-Bey hits a three for FDU, the Knights get a stop and Jo’el Emanuel makes a putback layup to tie the game with three seconds left. Just when everyone thinks it’s headed to overtime, Saint Peter’s freshman Bryce Eaton does this:
The kid sprints the length of the floor in three seconds to beat the buzzer. Unbelievable ending. Eaton leads the Peacocks in assists (3.2 per game), ranks third in scoring (9.8) and has established himself as one of the key pieces to this year’s team.There isn’t much worth taking away from Princeton’s 99-63 win over Division III Nazareth, except this: Mitch Henderson kept Philip Byriel at the starting five, and both Byriel and freshman center CJ Happy went 4-of-8 from three and combined for 30 points. More data points are needed, but after trying Jacob Huggins and Malik Abdullahi at starting center perhaps Princeton is pivoting back to a lineup resembling last year’s: Caden Pierce and four guys that can shoot from outside. The solution for the interior defense is another matter.
NJIT has entered the win column after concluding the Cleveland State MTE Wednesday by beating Morehead State 78-69, something I kinda sorta predicted in my Feast Week primer. The Highlanders’ Tariq Francis-Sebastian Robinson backcourt combined for 44 points with five made threes and 11-for-11 foul shooting, offsetting Morehead’s Kenny White Jr., who dominated for 34 points. To cap a chaotically back-and-forth second half, NJIT outscored Morehead 15-5 in the final four minutes, with Robinson’s triple at 3:49 putting NJIT up for good. That leaves Monmouth as the only New Jersey team left winless, one of just seven remaining in Division I.