Wagner 58, Hofstra 43 (Or: Things can get a little strange in a New York minute)

Don Henley makes solo albums faster than I produce game recaps! (Grrr)

Do this sportswriter thing—whether it’s of the actual paid variety or not—long enough and you come to understand that declaring doom every time the local five (or nine, or 11, or…how many players on a hockey team again?) strings together consecutive duds gets you nowhere fast, unless you want to end up screaming about self-generated storylines on the radio or with a bunch of talking heads on the idiot box. Which is what most sportswriters seemingly want to do these days, but that’s neither here nor there.

And after some time, you realize, with minimal exception, every season has several story arcs and ebbs and flows. The old coaching cliché is true: A team is never as good or as bad as it looks at any given moment.

Which is good for the Flying Dutchmen, because this given moment looks pretty rotten following Tuesday’s 58-43 loss to Wagner. (Sorry for the delay, which of course I promised wouldn’t happen anymore this year. Speaking of rotten, I’d like to give you my week, except I like you too much)

“You guys know me, I’m not going to make excuses,” Mo Cassara said afterward. “We obviously have a long way to go and we have a lot to improve on. I’m not a huge stat guy but statistically we just didn’t play well tonight. We’ve got a lot of guys that really have to play a lot better.”

Here’s the postgame buffet (don’t worry, it’s not rancid, I’ve refrigerated it) from Staten Island:

1.) At first glance, the Dutchmen avoided the type of loss that ends up in the media guide for all the wrong reasons. They got to 40 points, avoiding their first sub-40 point performance since Feb. 28, 1999. They hit just 13 field goals, scored only 20 second half points and committed 20 turnovers, none of which is very good but none of which were historical: The 13 field goals were the fewest in a game since Nov. 10, 2007 (Charles Jenkins’ debut). And the Dutchmen scored 20 points in a half twice during the 2009-10 season and committed 20 turnovers against Old Dominion Jan. 9. 2010.

So it wasn’t that bad, right? Not quite. The Dutchmen went an incredible 23 consecutive possessions in the second half—a span of 13:59—without hitting a field goal. Only a pretty good performance at the free throw line during that drought (12-for-17) prevented the Dutchmen from enduring a terribly superlative performance. And Nathaniel Lester’s jumper with 1:17 left ensured the Dutchmen would score more points in game no. 2,000 than Hofstra did in any of its 17 games way back in the debut season of Flying Dutchmen basketball in 1936-37. So…yay?

“We just had too many turnovers—you can’t turn the ball over the way that we did tonight,” Cassara said. “We turned the ball over 20 times on the road, it’s going to be very, very hard to win. We just couldn’t produce easy baskets tonight.”

2.) It’s also very, very hard to win when you are down to six scholarship players. The Bryant Crowder Saga continues to drag on, with the enigmatic 6-foot-10 center still suspended. Stephen Nwaukoni was left back at campus with a 103 degree temperature and while Stevie Mejia was in uniform, he was available only in an extreme emergency as he continues battling a hamstring injury.

All of which meant Matt Grogan played a career-high 19 minutes—11 more than he’d played in the first eight games combined—and shared the court with fellow walk-on Jereme Good. Twice. I don’t need to dig through media guides to tell you that’s never happened before in the DD Era.

Remember when I was raving about the Dutchmen’s depth? That was awesome. A mere two weeks later the Dutchmen are ravaged, though Nwaukoni should be back this afternoon and the hope is Mejia is back pretty soon.

“That’s where we are right now,” Cassara said. “Unfortunately, a lot of times in basketball, you have to be good, you have to be a little lucky and you have to stay healthy. Last year, we had all those things happen. We were pretty good, we stayed very healthy and we got lucky. We had a couple breaks go our way. This year we just haven’t had those things happen. And that’s part of the game—that’s part of the challenge for us as a staff and as a young team. We’ve still got to find a way to put the ball in the basket and find a way to squeeze out some wins here.”

3.) The Dutchmen will need much better performances out of most of their veterans in order to squeeze out some wins between now and the real start of the CAA season. Lester had his best game in weeks (12 points on 4-of-11 shooting with a team-high seven rebounds), but while Mike Moore had 15 points and four steals, he was just 4-of-16 from the field, committed six turnovers with zero assists and seemed to let his frustrations get the best of him most of the evening.

Dwan McMillan had eight points and six rebounds, but just three assists and five turnovers. David Imes had two blocks and two steals but just two points (on 1-of-8 shooting) and six rebounds. And Shemiye McLendon had an Iona-esque game with five turnovers and two points in just 22 minutes.

“This has been a tough stretch for us,” Cassara said. “I think we really got beat up physically and mentally from that two weeks of travel and losing a couple tough close games and right now we don’t have that internal fortitude to fight ourselves through it. As a coaching staff we’ve got to push and fight our guys through that and we’ve got to find a way to get better.”

4.) Things weren’t entirely bleak for the Dutchmen Tuesday. The Dutchmen held an opponent below 70 points for the fourth straight game and the sixth time in seven games. Wagner, three days removed from putting 90 points up on St. Francis, had as many turnovers (19) as field goals.

“You know, I think we’re doing some really good things defensively,” Cassara said. “We forced them into some turnovers. We got some good stops. We gave up too many easy second-chance shots when we got tired there, but I like where we are defensively.”

The Dutchmen also had a good couple days of practice prior to the game, leading Cassara to believe that once the Dutchmen finally get a win, the rest of the pieces could begin falling into place, much as things did after the Dutchmen snapped out of their January 2010 funk by throttling UNC Wilmington 93-54 Jan. 27 to begin a season-ending stretch in which Hofstra won nine of its final 10 regular season games.

“That year we just got better as the year went on, learning from all the close losses,” Lester said. “Going to practice and watching film and getting better day by day—that’s how we picked it up.”

5.) Of course, today’s opponent, Manhattan, has won three in a row and just throttled Fordham by 34 (the Jaspers play Towson next—does that mean Cassara will eventually coach there?), and if the Dutchmen can’t win this one they may have the unenviable task of trying to snap a losing streak against a winless opponent when Binghamton visits next Saturday. The pressure is building, and the frustrating thing is a win in one or more of the games the Dutchmen squandered late would have changed the entire landscape of the season.

“As a coach you look at the big picture a lot of times, and I knew sitting at home late at night after a couple of those [close losses] that these were the games we were really going to feel those losses a lot more,” Cassara said. “Certainly you feel them now because there’s certainly two to three games in our schedule that we clearly could have won with a bounce here or a bounce there. You win those games, we come here without some bodies, with some injuries and various things, then the pressure’s not on you as much because you know that you’ve got a couple wins in your back pocket. Unfortunately we don’t.”

3 STARS OF THE GAME (vs. Wagner, 12/6)

3: Nathanel Lester

2: Dwan McMillan

1: Mike Moore

SEASON STANDINGS

Mike Moore 18

Nathaniel Lester 11

Dwan McMillan 6

David Imes 6

Shemiye McLendon 5

Stevie Mejia 3

Stephen Nwaukoni 3

Bryant Crowder 2

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

The more I know, the less I understand

Because there are no still images of The Heart of the Matter, and who can resist such a quintessentially '70s photo? Go ahead everyone try and figure out what Hotel California is really about!

Two years ago this week, I undertook a nightly exercise I dubbed “Chalke Talk.” I did this for two reasons. One, because it was an amusing (to me, anyway) play on words and it gave me an excuse I didn’t need to post pictures of Scrubs knockout Sarah Chalke. And two, because I convinced myself the Flying Dutchmen, who were knocked out of the CAA Tournament in the quarterfinals by Old Dominion, had a shot at an NIT berth.

Looking back, I was wasting my time, other than the time I spent Googling Sarah Chalke (sounds like the sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Though the Dutchmen finished the season 21-11, they had just 20 wins against Division I foes, only finished fifth in the CAA during the regular season and played a famously weak non-conference schedule in which their best win was a one-point decision the opening weekend of the year over eventual Atlantic Sun champion East Tennessee State, which was 111th in the final RPI. In addition, I had to be on some kind of magic peyote to think a fifth-place team that didn’t get beyond the quarterfinals of its conference tournament.

This year, such an exercise would seem to be particularly useful, since the Dutchmen finished third—technically, tied for second—during the regular season and advanced to the CAA semifinals before they were eliminated by eventual champion Old Dominion. But I’m more convinced than I was 104 weeks ago that it’d be a waste of time—partially because those damn kids over at the CAAZone beat me to the discussion, but mostly because it appears the Dutchmen are in danger of getting squeezed out of the field by at least one and as many as TWO teams that finished below them this season.

Of the five mock NIT brackets I’ve found, two have Hofstra in: “Brad-ketology” at MVN.com has the Dutchmen as a sixth seed, as of tonight, while our good friend Patrick Stevens of the D1scourse blog at The Washington Times had the Dutchmen as a seventh seed as of Monday (which means they are almost surely out now, as several regular season champions of mid-major conferences have lost in their tournaments since then and will receive an automatic bid to the NIT).

Two other sites—Chicagonow.com and Nitology.com—have the Dutchmen as one of the first handful of teams out of the field as of their most recent update (Wednesday for Chicagonow.com, Sunday for NITology.com). A fifth site, The Bracket Project, doesn’t even have Hofstra in the discussion. Boooo!

Meanwhile, Drexel—which finished fifth in the CAA at 12-6, two games behind the Dutchmen, and lost the biggest joke of a quarterfinal game in tournament history when the refs gave VCU a 62-60 win Saturday—is slotted in four of the five mock NIT brackets and among the teams that just miss the field at Chicagonow.com. And James Madison, which finished sixth in the CAA at 10-8 and was upset by 11th-seeded William & Mary in the quarterfinals, is listed as a sixth seed at Chicagonow.com and is among the last teams out of the field at Bracket Project.

If the Dutchmen do in fact miss out on the NIT (this is presuming George Mason makes the NCAAs), it will mark only the second time since the CAA expanded in 2001-02 that the CAA’s highest-seeded non-NCAA participant did not make the NIT. Second-seeded VCU lost to eventual NIT participant Drexel in the semifinals of the 2003 tournament, but the Rams were just 18-10 that season and finished in a tie for second with Drexel.

How is this possible? How is the third-place team in an outstanding mid-major that will send at least two and possibly three teams to the NCAA Tournament sweating out an NIT bid and, we presume, making contingency plans with the CBI and/or the CIT while a fifth-place team that failed to get out of the quarterfinals and a sixth-place team that didn’t even get there are in the discussion?

The common explanation I’m getting—other than the fact nine mid-major regular season champions have earned automatic bids to the NIT by virtue of losing in their conference tournament, which has drastically cut the number of available at-large spots—is that the Dutchmen’s non-conference schedule pales in comparison to those played by Drexel and James Madison.

No argument there: Much like two years ago, the Dutchmen are sorely lacking a Signature Win outside the CAA. They went 0-3 against non-conference opposition currently ranked in the top 100 (North Carolina, Nebraska and Iona) and their best non-conference win is over Rider, ranked 108th as of today. And just like two years ago, this team finished the CAA Tournament at 21-11 with 20 wins over Division I opposition.

Drexel, meanwhile, went 2-2 against top 100 foes, shocking Louisville on the road and beating Kent State in the BracketBuster, while James Madison was 3-2 against the top 100 with wins over Princeton, Marshall and Kent State prior to the New Year.

But as well as Drexel and James Madison played out of conference, and as unimposing a schedule Hofstra played, shouldn’t their performances during the league season—which represents more than 50 percent of the schedule—play a bigger role when trying to establish NIT at-large candidacies?

In addition to finishing comfortably ahead of Drexel and James Madison, the Flying Dutchmen went 3-5 against top 100 CAA foes (beat George Mason, Drexel and James Madison, lost twice to Old Dominion and once each to George Mason, Drexel and VCU). Drexel and James Madison each went 3-6 against top 100 CAA foes.

Granted, a half-game difference is not that much. But two and four games in the standings and advancing one and two rounds farther, respectively, in the conference tournament is a big deal. Should the Dutchmen be punished because they are a far better team in March than they were in November and December? Should they be punished because they didn’t draw a top 100 team in the BracketBuster (Wright State—which, admittedly, hammered the Dutchmen—is currently 126th). Shouldn’t they be rewarded for being better over the longer haul of the conference season?

Over on the NCAA side of the bubble, our good friends at George Mason seem to be getting rewarded for their outstanding CAA performance. The Patriots were 2-1 against current top 100 foes during the non-conference season, beating Harvard (34) and Duquesne (94) and falling to Dayton (79).

That’s a solid, if not world-beating, performance, but the Patriots became America’s media darlings and a Top 25 team again (bleeech) by going 6-3 in games against top 100 CAA foes. Six of their 14 straight conference wins to end the season were against current top 100 teams. It is very fair to say that if Mason had lost two of those games—to fall to 4-5 against CAA teams in the top 100 and 14-4 in the league overall—they’d likely be a lot more nervous about their at-large hopes right now.

(I, of course, can hope they’ll get screwed anyway, not so much out of Schadenfreude—I am selling out people, I’m either taking pictures or corresponding on Twitter with a whole bunch of one-time mortal enemies—but so they FINALLY FREAKING UNDERSTAND what pissed me off so much about Tom O’Connor’s placement on the Selection Committee five years ago. OK it is still out of Schadenfreude. But I digress)

Speaking of 2006: If Hofstra ends up missing the NIT this year, I won’t go crazy over it, toss and turn at night and declare lifelong war upon the schools and forces that kept the Dutchmen out. It’s the NIT, man, you can’t get that upset about it.

Plus, as I’ll write tomorrow, I’m actually more intrigued by the possibility of a multiple-game run in one of the smaller tournaments. But still: If the Dutchmen miss out, and Drexel and/or James Madison make it, I will, in a less angry way, be just as bemused as I was five years ago this weekend and wonder why this stuff makes less sense the more we are informed about it.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.