So this is what I originally wrote as the first graph of this blog
entry last Sunday, and would have appeared as the first graph of this blog if
I’d managed to post it Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday:
Let’s make one thing abundantly clear: As much as the Flying
Dutchmen’s 69-63 loss to James Madison on Saturday sucked—and it sucked more
than the suckiest bunch of sucks have ever sucked—it beats the alternative
we’ve lived through the last three years.
Good thing I didn’t post it. Because Wednesday night’s
100-78 loss to William & Mary was infinitely suckier than the suckiest
bunch of sucks that have ever sucked.
So this is what I originally wrote as the second graph of this blog
entry, etc etc:
In a weird, twisted, possibly life-affirming way, watching
the Dutchmen do everything wrong to blow a 14-point lead and lose by two
possessions was infinitely better than watching them do almost everything right
and still lose by a point or two, which happened on a nearly nightly basis
during the first three seasons of the post-Charles Jenkins Era.
Wrong again. I could go on, and post every graph I wrote and
then amend it, but you get the point. What was initially just a worrisome and
maddening hiccup is now a full-fledged embarrassment, a stretch of four losses
in five games that causes me to reconsider what I was writing earlier in the
week.
Too hyperbolic? I’m usually guilty as charged of that, but I
might be understating things considering some of these facts from Wednesday night:
--The Dutchmen never led, trailed by 27 points just 13:38
into the game, trailed 54-34 at the half and ended up surrendering 100 points
to a CAA opponent for the first time. The last time they gave up 100 points in
a league game was Jan. 6, 1996, when Drexel handed the Dutchmen a 101-71 loss.
That was so long ago, the America East was still called the North Atlantic
Conference. And I was still in school.
--To lose by 21 when down by 27 13:38 into the game doesn’t
look that bad. Except the Dutchmen cut the gap to 11 six minutes into the
second half and trailed by 12 with six minutes left. William & Mary then
ended the game on a 23-14 run. So there was no way to even spin the loss as
“Well, it was bad, but it could have been worse.”
--The Dutchmen gave up their 100th point in the
most slapstick way possible. With the full-court press on against the end of
the Tribe bench, Rokas Gustys forced a turnover with 33 seconds left. Alas,
Ameen Tanksley turned it over four seconds later and Oliver Tot not only hit a
fast break layup for the Tribe’s 99th and 100th points
but got intentionally fouled by Eliel Gonzalez in the process.
--The Dutchmen allowed William & Mary to shoot 64.8
percent from the field. It was the highest shooting percentage surrendered by
the Dutchmen in the CAA era, breaking the record set a whopping two weeks
earlier against Northeastern (63.8 percent).
--Guess how many times over the previous three
seasons—during which the Dutchmen were almost impossibly undermanned and
overmatched—the Dutchmen lost a CAA game by at least 21 points? Three times,
and only twice in the regular season, both in 2012-13, when the Dutchmen were
at their most impossibly undermanned and overmatched.
So yeah. It was bad.
Following the James Madison loss—in which the Dutchmen blew
a 14-point second half lead to fall for the third time in four games following
a 4-0 start in CAA play—I had a thesis going that the current skid for the
Dutchmen was the basketball equivalent of a first fight with a new girlfriend
or boyfriend, the one who healed the wounds administered by the psycho
hosebeast from hell—in this case, the 2012-13 season—and made it possible to
fall in love again.
And, well, I kinda liked it, so I’m gonna run with it.
My theory was that patience had to be exercised and that at
some point adjustments need to be made to the quirks, flaws and imperfections
that inevitably crop up between both parties.
Those traits are impossible to see when a relationship
begins with a bunch of Coppin States and Jacksonvilles and Central
Connecticuts, in which all the shots are falling and all the fun is being had
and the passion runs white-hot. There’s a Stony Brook night at the start of any
relationship, in which a dance with danger ends in euphoric fashion. The adrenaline
of something new carries us through even the occasionally less-than-stellar North
Carolina State or South Florida experience.
If there was a point of no return in this emotional
investment, it was obliterated during the first two weeks of the new year, when
the Dutchmen received a vote in the AP Top 25 courtesy of John Feinstein (whose
books amazingly just became a lot more readable to me), were pegged as the
CAA’s NCAA Tournament representative in Joe Lunardi’s bracketology (which
amazingly just became a lot more tolerable to me) and beat the league’s three
southernmost teams on the road—UNC Wilmington, College of Charleston and Elon—in
becoming the only CAA team to open 4-0 in conference play.
But no partnership can run in the red forever. At some
point, stuff the other one does starts to, quite frankly, drive you nuts.
He drinks a six-pack of Mountain Dew a day, and stacks the
cans along the windowsill in his dorm room like some kind of avant garde art
project. He reads four newspapers a day, ostensibly for any articles about
Hofstra sports, but he rarely clips articles and instead stacks the papers as
if trying to start a fire that’ll burn down Vander Poel Hall in five minutes.
He isn’t making any money, but spends a lot of cash on compact discs, which
fortunately will never go out of style. He really likes hair metal, which went
out of style four years ago.
(Hey Michelle give me back the keyboard!)
In this case, we are starting to notice that under
second-year coach Joe Mihalich, the Dutchmen’s shoot-their-way-out-of-it
approach to offensive slumps makes their current skid possible.
Against William & Mary, Mihalich called one timeout
during the disastrous first half—after the Dutchmen fell behind by 27 with 6:17
left, not when a 5-5 tie turned into a 16-5 deficit during a seven-possession
stretch in which Hofstra racked up more turnovers (four) than missed shots
(three).
Against James Madison, he used only one timeout in the
second half—not during the Dukes’ 14-0 run that erased a 12-point lead midway
through the half but right after a 3-pointer by Brian Bernardi gave the
Dutchmen a 59-58 lead with 5:25 left.
On Jan. 17, the Dutchmen squandered a six-point lead in the
final 5:42 of a 79-74 loss to UNC Wilmington. The Dutchmen finished the game by
going 1-for-9 from the field in their last 12 possessions. Mihalich used three
timeouts in the second half, one in the first 90 seconds after the Seahawks
tied the game and two in the final 90 seconds with Hofstra down one point both
times.
In their first CAA loss against Northeastern on Jan. 14, the
Dutchmen hoisted a remarkable 75 shots in falling, 91-83. That game turned late
in the second half, when the Dutchmen went scoreless from the field during
seven straight possessions that turned a one-point lead into a nine-point
deficit.
Mihalich called four timeouts in the final 8:27—one
immediately after Northeastern took the lead for good on a 3-pointer by David
Walker and three in the final 79 seconds. The Dutchmen were no closer than
seven points at any of the timeouts.
So we know now that Mihalich—whose Niagara teams scored at
least 100 points 18 times in his 15 seasons at the school, a stretch in which
Hofstra reached 100 points twice—doesn’t like to slow the pace, even when his
team is struggling. We know that he treats timeouts like Dean Smith (GOOGLE IT
CRAIN).
In addition, the high-octane offense that is so much fun to
watch—the Dutchmen are averaging 78.7 points per game this season, the most
since the 1977-78 team averaged 81.3 points per game—results in a lot of points
being scored the other way, which is magnified when the Dutchmen are struggling
to score themselves.
The Dutchmen are allowing an average of 68.6 points per
game, a figure exceeded by seven of the previous 13 Hofstra squads. However,
the Dutchmen are allowing opposing teams to shoot 44.7 percent, which would be
the third-highest figure surrendered by Hofstra since the move to the CAA in
2001. Last year’s team allowed opponents to shoot 45.3 percent while the
2011-12 squad allowed opponents to shoot 45.7 percent.
In mid-major land, a team that scores a lot is probably
going to give up a lot. Still, this requires some adjustments, especially for
fans used to the sludgy style of Tom Pecora, in which it seemed every game
ended up 65-60.
And none of these statistics indicate that Mihalich’s
way—and by extension, the new Dutchmen way—is wrong. In fact, there’s ample
evidence to suggest it works: Niagara won 265 games, reached two NCAA
Tournaments and three NITs in his 15 seasons. There’s a very good chance this
relationship works for the long-term.
But it’s not wrong either to have been disappointed by the
Northeastern loss, frustrated with the UNC Wilmington loss, downright furious
with the James Madison loss and some combination of disappointed, frustrated
and furious after the William & Mary loss.
The emotions are heightened by the down nature of the CAA
and the sense that, for the first time since the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons,
Hofstra has a legitimate chance to win the league and advance to the NCAA
Tournament. The frustration is fueled by the gift the Dutchmen received on Jan.
21, when a wire-to-wire win over Drexel coupled with Delaware’s upset of
William & Mary vaulted the Dutchmen back into a tie for first place,
Three days later, they were in a tie for fourth. Now they’re
all alone in fifth, two games behind William & Mary and UNC-Wilmington, the
latter of whom has a first-year coach directing the same bunch of players that
finished dead last in the CAA last year.
History is, of course, littered with teams that recovered
from poor games or poor stretches to flirt with or make history in March. VCU’s
Final Four team ended the regular season with four losses in five games,
including a 20-point loss to George Mason.
Last season, William & Mary lost four CAA games by at
least 15 points—including a 17-point loss at Hofstra, which finished the season
with five league wins—yet came within a missed Marcus Thornton buzzer-beater of
winning the conference title game (sorry, Gheorghe The Blog)
Whether the Dutchmen bounce all the way back to the NCAA
Tournament or not, there will be better, November- and December-esque days
ahead, perhaps as soon as this week. Beginning tonight, the Dutchmen’s next
three games are against the bottom-tier trio of Towson, Delaware and Elon. So
perhaps the Northeastern rematch on Feb. 12 will be for a share of second
place, or of first place.
We will adjust to each other’s quirks, and begin to laugh
about them instead of letting them ruining an otherwise fine evening, as this
new relationship evolves.
But right now, we want more from a basketball team that has scaled
heights this season the program didn’t even come close to achieving the
previous three years, and more than a fiery start resulting in a quick flameout
in the CAA Tournament.
Less than an hour after the loss to James Madison, I was in
line to see Extreme (i.e. The Official Band of Defiantly Dutch) at The Space at
Westbury. While waiting, I heard the band’s soundcheck and their performance of
the 1995 song “Hip Today.” I promptly texted the chorus—“You’ll be gone
tomorrow, you’ll be gone tomorrow, hip today”—to my wife as a summation of what we'd just seen. That’s normal, right?
As better as things are now than they were one, two and three years ago at this time, it’s no
longer enough. We want the Dutchmen to become hip again beginning tonight, and
to remain that way for the next 37 days.
(At least)
