PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By JP Pelzman
As Bryce Aiken agonized incredulously over the controversial foul call against him--apparently challenging three-pointers with your face is considered optimal defensive play by the officiating crew that worked Saturday’s Seton Hall-Marquette game--one man in the building likely knew exactly how Aiken felt.
That person would be first-year Pirates assistant coach Donald Copeland, who was whistled for a similarly controversial foul against Rutgers star Quincy Douby on Feb. 8, 2005. In that case, replays showed Copeland hadn’t even touched Douby, but Les Jones called the foul anyway.
Douby missed the first free throw and made the second for an overtime victory. In eerily similar fashion, Greg Elliott made the first with 1.8 seconds left and missed the second, perhaps on purpose, to lift the Golden Eagles (12-6, 4-3 Big East) to a disputed 73-72 win over the Pirates (11-5, 2-4) in Milwaukee.
“Next question, please,” Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard said when broadcaster Dave Popkin asked him about the call on the postgame radio show on 970 AM.
Presumably, Willard had no desire to be fined and contribute to the league office and perhaps help pay the fees of officials Matt Potter, Paul Szelc and James Breeding, who mistakenly instructed Myles Cale he could run the baseline on the inbounds after the timeout The Hall called following Elliott’s miss. The do-over pass resulted in a turnover 60 feet from the hoop.
However, Willard did say this. "I didn’t think we got some fouls calls going to the basket late in the second half, but I was really impressed with our aggressiveness not settling for shots."
There was were 39 minutes and 58 and 2/10ths seconds of action before that fateful foul call, and as Willard noted, that had an impact on the game too.
Marquette “came out hot from three,” Willard said in the radio interview. “They banked one in. We had two turnovers against their pressure that led to them getting threes, and that kind of got us in a hole. Then we started taking care of the ball.”
Marquette made five of its first seven three-pointers on its way to a 19-10 lead, and just like that, the Pirates were fighting from behind just as they had been two days earlier in a loss at DePaul. The Golden Eagles led 44-33 with 1:49 left in the first half, but the Pirates scored the final eight points of the half, six by Aiken, to make it 44-41.
The Hall finally grabbed the lead on a jumper in the lane by Jared Rhoden with 13:54 to go, making it 51-50. In fact, the Pirates led by five on three separate occasions and by four at 65-61 on Aiken’s heat-check trey with 5:13 left.
“We finally started to look like the defensive unit we can be in the second half,” Willard said.
Marquette shot only 32.3% after halftime.
He added, “If we clean up our defense, I like where we’re at.”
Justin Lewis’ runner in the lane with 41 seconds left put Marquette up 72-70, but Aiken who scored 28 points, answered with two foul shots with 31 seconds left.
Aiken, who came in shooting 83.8% from the line, went only 5-for-7 for the day.
Aiken's two free throws tied the score at 72.
And, well, you all know what happened next. If only the guys who are paid to know had done a better job figuring it out.
