PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By J.P. Pelzman
Of course it had to come down to free throws and a shall we say, shaky foul call. Of course. The basketball gods wouldn’t have it any other way in the teams’ first meeting since 1989, and only their second contest since that fateful NCAA final in Seattle that same year.
But the fact that Seton Hall won 67-65 in Ann Arbor, Mich. Tuesday night after Michigan’s Terrance Williams missed the foul shot he wanted to make and made the one he wanted to miss had little to do with luck or destiny, and much more to do with the basketball mind of coach Kevin Willard.
With The Hall trailing 45-34, Willard decided it was time to turn up the defensive volume and go to full-court pressure. Sticking with that late 1980s vibe, Willard’s normal defensive philosophy will never be confused with that of say, Nolan Richardson. But just a few minutes of hell, rather than 40, was what was needed to turn the tide.
“(Michigan) got into a really good rhythm. I needed something to get our guys’ energy going,” Willard said in a post-game interview with FoxSports1.
The Wolverines turned the ball over six times as their 11-point lead melted into a tie at 57 when Bryce Aiken, who scored 13 points in relief of an ineffective Kadary Richmond, hit a three from the left wing with 4:30 to go. The game was tied twice more and then became a battle of free throws. Aiken's pair with 32 seconds left made it 65-64, The Hall, and super senior Myles Cale made one of two with 13 seconds to go after Eli Brooks missed a runner in the lane.
On that play, Willard told Seton Hall radio broadcasters Gary Cohen and Dave Popkin on AM 970 that he switched to a zone because he feared a pass to Michigan’s 7-1 center Hunter Dickinson. Sure enough, he indicated that they ran a ball screen to free Dickinson for a post-up.
“We certainly played it right,” Willard said, which forced the shot by Brooks.
Although Dickinson scored 18 points on 8-for-11 shooting, he never quite took the game over.
Willard credited that fact to a special pick-and-roll defense he installed at practice Monday at 2 p.m., as told to Cohen and Popkin. He said of his players, “they really bought in” to the new defense. Clearly, they executed it well. Dickinson didn’t get most of his points on pick and rolls.
That left Michigan with one final chance. Williams drew minimal contact from a leaping Jared Rhoden, but couldn’t convert the one he needed.
“This is where we are as a program,” Willard said afterward, per the Associated Press. “I expected us to win this game. This wasn’t a shock to me.
“We can play anybody in the country and we’ve done that in the last seven years.”
“Not to take anything away from Seton Hall,” Michigan coach Juwan Howard said, “they’re a well-coached team and they won a tough game on the road...but we let them off the hook a few times” with Michigan’s offensive execution.
“And we did get fouled at the end,” he said.
As for the 1989 game, won by Rumeal Robinson’s foul shots after John Clougherty’s infamous ticky-tack foul call, Willard said, “I’ve watched the game like five times,” Willard said. “It was a phenomenal game. It was like this, a really, really good basketball game.”
And this was another one that will live in Seton Hall lore. But this time, for the right reasons.
