PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
By JP Pelzman
The night began as the long-awaited Bryce Aiken celebration.
But Creighton rejected that narrative, and launched a different one. From beyond the three-point line.
Again and again and again. Until the Bluejays plunged in the dagger.
The 17th-ranked Bluejays made a whopping 17 of 35 threes, including Mitch Ballock’s go-ahead trey with 41 seconds left, to rally from a 16-point second-half deficit and deal the Pirates a stunning 85-81 loss at the Prudential Center on Wednesday night.
Thus, instead of securing a huge, resume-building victory in its first home game in 25 days, Seton Hall (9-7, 6-4 Big East) must now face third-ranked Villanova at home on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. with another opportunity to improve its chances of making the NCAA Tournament in this oddest and most challenging of college basketball seasons, when teams do not know from day to day what team they will next face.
That’s why this loss hurts so much, because there is no guarantee in this COVID-19 world that all the games remaining on The Hall’s Big East schedule actually will tip off.
Seton Hall hit a scorching 15-for-25 in the first half, including 7-for-12 from long distance. The Pirates also were buoyed by the performance of grad transfer guard Aiken, who scored 12 of his team-high 21 points before intermission and then added the Pirates’ first basket of the second half while working on Marcus Zegarowski.
Interestingly, Aiken was re-injured in the earlier meeting between the teams in Omaha, when he stepped on a Creighton player’s foot and had to helped off the court with an ankle injury. That was the first of many mishaps for the Pirates in a blowout loss on Jan. 6. But he had quite a spring in his step on this night, hitting an NBA-range trey in the first half and also using his trademark quickness to bedevil Zegarowski and the other Bluejay defenders.
But Aiken didn’t play much down the stretch, with coach Kevin Willard explaining afterward that he is on a "minutes restriction" because of his recurring injuries.
“They were running a zone, a really tight zone, which was very good,” said Myles Cale, who scored only two of his 20 points in the second half and missed the front end of a crucial one-and-one with 2:21 left and the Pirates nursing a five-point lead.
“Their hands were very active,” Cale added about the Bluejays’ defenders. “Maybe we’ve just got to adjust better.”
Willard said, “I thought we had a really good rhythm (and then) I thought their zone really kind of got us standing on our heels. They hit a couple of big threes and we just kind of got stagnant and got a little bit on our heels on the offensive end, but give them credit. Switching to the zone really kind of got the ball sticking a little bit. More credit (to) their defense than (blame on) our guys’ offense.”
After the miss by Cale, Denzel Mahoney then banked in a three-pointer to cut the lead to two and help set up the frantic finish. Seton Hall tied the game at 81 on a contested drive by Takal Molson, but both Sandro Mamukelashvili and Jared Rhoden missed good shots down the stretch as the Bluejays (12-4, 8-3) closed the game on a 14-2 run after Shavar Reynolds’ basket with 3:01 left had given the Pirates a 79-71 advantage.
“We didn’t protect the three-point line,” Cale said. “It was a whole team loss. You can’t point the finger at anybody.”
About squandering the 16-point lead, Cale said, “Elite teams don’t let that happen,” and added that “Coach got on us.”
When Willard was asked about that, he said, “I didn’t really get on them that bad. There were a lot of good things that I saw. I just said we’ve got to get better defensively. We've got to get a better defensive mindset. I pretty much took all the blame. "
“We’re not very good defensively and that’s on me,” Willard said. “We’ve been a top 20 defensive team the last seven years. We might not even be Division I right now. We’ve got to find a way to get stops with the game on the line.”
And they’ll have to figure that out before Villanova comes to town.
