Iona 87, Hofstra 62 (Or: I’ve seen Charles Jenkins angry. You won’t like Charles Jenkins when he’s angry)

Break free of your first half cage, Charles! (And please, fare better than the Incredible Hulk movies. Please.)

For three-plus years now, Charles Jenkins has been the kindly superstar. Unselfish and team-oriented, he has been a dream to coach for two coaches—except for the part where he is TOO unselfish and TOO team-oriented.

As anyone who has seen the second half of a Flying Dutchmen game this season can attest, Jenkins possesses the ability and willingness to carry the Dutchmen. Yet he spends the first half of games deferring to teammates and trying to create opportunities for them, which sounds great in theory but isn’t so great in reality because it means the best player on the court isn’t in position to score.

At least, that’s the way he was for the first 107 games of his career. The last 18, 19, 20, 21 or 22? Those will be entirely different stories.

“This is the last game you’ll see me be passive in the first half,” Jenkins said.

And not a moment too soon, judging by how the Dutchmen were manhandled, 87-62, by Iona last night in New Rochelle. It wasn’t Jenkins’ fault the Dutchmen were routed—he had a game-high 20 points—but another quiet first half put the Dutchmen into a hole from which they had little hope of escaping against the red-hot Gaels.

Jenkins had just five points on 1-of-3 shooting in the first half, which ended with the Dutchmen down 40-26. Mike Moore kept the Dutchmen afloat in the opening 20 minutes by scoring 11 of his 18 points and pulling down five of his team-high seven rebounds while Greg Washington (six points) and David Imes (four points) combined to shoot 5-of-8 from the field.

But guards Brad Kelleher and Shemiye McLendon, identified by Mo Cassara as players who had to contribute in order for the Dutchmen to win, were 0-for-7 in the first half and 0-for-15 overall. Appropriately, the first and last shots of the game were misses by Kelleher.

By the time Jenkins got rolling in the second half, Iona was already putting the finishing touches on the blowout: Jenkins scored 11 straight points for Hofstra over a span of four-and-a-half minutes, during which Iona increased its lead from 16 to 17.

“We needed to get him some more shots tonight,” Cassara said. “Charles has got to keep moving. He didn’t get enough attempts for us to have a chance to win.”

Jenkins also shouldered plenty of the blame for the oddly dispassionate play of the Dutchmen, who suffered one of the most resounding defeats of the Defiantly Dutch Era. The 25-point margin of defeat was the Dutchmen’s worst at the hands of a non-BCS foe since falling by 36 to Xavier Dec. 14, 1996, their worst loss to a true mid-major program since a 30-point loss to Drexel Feb. 11, 1996 and their worst non-conference loss to mid-major program since a 35-point loss to Maine Jan. 11, 1994, way back when I was biding time at home and eagerly anticipating the first Happy Hour at Fezziwigs of the spring semester. Yes. It was a long time ago.

The Dutchmen never led as Iona shot a blistering 61.1 percent (not 10,000 percent, as some fool on Twitter may or may not have written), the best (or worst) performance by an opponent since at least the 2001-02 season. The Gaels got better as the game went along: They shot 58.3 percent in the first half and 63.3 percent in the second half, when they scored on a mind-boggling 24 of 35 possessions. Had the game been comprised of thirds, Iona may have scored 150 points.

Offensively, the Dutchmen scored 25 fewer points than the Gaels on two more shots. They were also outhustled throughout and seemed to lack a sense of urgency after playing Iona to a 13-13 tie in the first nine minutes.

“A lot of credit goes to Iona—they were the more aggressive team tonight,” Cassara said. “We didn’t do a good job executing our game plan on offense or defense. We were a step slow to the ball, we were beat to a lot of loose balls and 50/50 balls. They outhustled us tonight.”

“A big game like this—we’ve got a history with this program—for us to [lose] like this hurts,” Jenkins said. “Coach told us before the game that the tougher team was going to win. We weren’t the tougher team and it showed in the score.”

The optimistic way of looking at Wednesday is that the Dutchmen ran into the imperfect storm: An inexperienced and undermanned team (the Dutchmen played just seven players with Dwan McMillan and Yves Jules out due to illness) looked its age, so to speak, and had a little bit of post-blizzard, post-Christmas hangover against an opponent not lacking for motivation or focus after suffering an upset loss to Vermont seven days earlier.

But the realistic way of looking at things is this was absolutely not the effort the Dutchmen needed to produce with two formidable foes coming up as CAA play really begins next week. The Dutchmen visit sudden contender Drexel Monday before hosting our good friends George Mason, who lost a tough one (aww) to Dayton last night and will be primed to send my blood pressure through the roof in a visit to Hempstead Wednesday, so any more efforts like Wednesday night will leave the Dutchmen playing from behind in the league, just as they did the last three seasons.

Jenkins said he and Washington, the only four-year seniors on the roster, need to jolt the Dutchmen out of their funk between now and Monday. “We’ve got to get into them that we can’t be so passive,” Jenkins said. “This is our last 12th game of the season. We’ve got to develop a sense of urgency for our teammates.”

The switch has to be flipped on—for the Dutchmen and, especially, for Jenkins, who has to become The Man for 40 minutes a night for the next nine or 10 weeks. And if the switch doesn’t get flipped? The words Jenkins uttered as he exited the gym last night—intended to serve as a lesson to his younger teammates—will prove to be sadly prescient.

“This game simulates the way conference games can be.”

3 STARS OF THE GAME (vs. Iona, 12/29)

3: Mike Moore

2: Charles Jenkins

1: Greg Washington

SEASON STANDINGS

Charles Jenkins 32

Mike Moore 16

Greg Washington 7

David Imes 7

Dwan McMillan 5

Shemiye McClendon 2

Brad Kelleher 1

Yves Jules 1

Stephen Nwaukoni 1

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

Iona 67, Hofstra 64 (Or: No, Hofstra, there is not a Santa Claus)

Yup. That pretty much sums it up.

Because if there was a Santa Claus then Cornelius Vines’ half-court shot as time expired would have finished circling around the rim and fallen in to send the game to overtime, where the Flying Dutchmen surely would have won…instead of rolling out to cap a gut-wrenching, this-wasn’t-the-way-anyone-on-the-Hofstra-bench-wanted-to-start-Christmas 67-64 loss.

I mean, isn’t Christmas the season of miracles? I’m not even asking for a real miracle, like world peace, or the repairing of America’s financial system, or my downstairs neighbors quitting smoking.

Isn’t Christmas the season of surprising joyous gifts? When I was 8 or 9, my best friend wanted an Atari. His mom said no, we’ll never have a video game system in this house, that stuff will rot your brain and ruin your attention span and eventually make you an adult who can’t concentrate on anything for more than four seconds at a time (OK, fine, it was 1981 or 1982, she didn’t say that).

Imagine his surprise when he ran to the tree Christmas morning and saw an Atari sitting there. His mom’s explanation? “The one time we lie in this family is Christmas Day.”

I’m sure, if I asked my mom to get me a game-tying, buzzer-beating half-court shot for Christmas, she’d say no, son, we don’t give out game-tying, buzzer-beating, half-court shots for Christmas. You’re going to get something you can use, like an easy out-of-conference schedule and another year without re-seating. And socks. Always socks.

But she would have gotten me that shot. All I wanted for Christmas was that shot to fall in. I mean, Iona got a 7-foot transfer from Louisville who pulled a Craig freakin' Hodges and drained a 3-pointer with 4.6 seconds left to give the Gaels the lead. So don’t we, as Hofstra fans, deserve Vines’ half-courter at the buzzer? All we do is get screwed. Even Charlie Brown got a functioning tree, eventually.

CAN’T ANYONE TELL ME WHAT CHRISTMAS IS ALL ABOUT?

(It’s either blame the absence of Santa Claus or blame my wife, who spent the previous 24 hours begging for good things to happen to her sports teams because her birthday is today. First she just wanted the Bears to keep their playoff hopes alive by beating the Packers Monday. Winning a game her team had no business winning wasn’t enough, so come Tuesday afternoon, she just wanted the rumors of Mark Teixeira signing with the Yankees to be true. Hope you’re happy honey!)

Of course, the rational way to look at Tuesday is that Hofstra was due for a close loss after four wins by five points or less—and that the Flying Dutchmen earned that loss with a largely mediocre performance and by frittering away chance after chance to put the game away in the final two minutes.

Charles Jenkins failed to increase the lead to five when he missed a free throw with 1:01 left (shades of Antoine Agudio against George Mason in January). The Dutchmen lobbed four air balls—FOUR AIR BALLS—with a chance to extend the lead to four or five points on consecutive possessions before the aforementioned 7-footer, Jonathan Huffman, hit the 3-pointer. Then the Dutchmen turned the ball over trying to push it up court and the Gaels’ Devon Clarke swished a pair of free throws to set up Vines’ near-miracle.

But I don’t want to be rational, because what’s the fun in that? Before two minutes of hell, this looked like one of those pivotal season-defining victories. The Dutchmen, who led by eight with just over 13 minutes to play in the first half and led by seven with just under eight minutes left, were outscored 34-21 over the subsequent 22 minutes. When Iona took its first lead at 22-21, Tom Pecora responded by pulling the Northeastern maneuver and yanking his two best players, Jenkins and Vines, and keeping them bolted to the bench for the final 3:25 of the half (and earning a withering look from Jenkins in the process). Iona outscored the Dutchmen 28-10 in the paint and its reserves outscored the Hofstra bench 34-20—even though the Gaels had just an eight-man rotation.

Hofstra finally woke up midway through the second half and outrebounded Iona 17-6 over the final 8:41. The Dutchmen were in the bonus by the 13-minute mark but hit 10 of 13 free throws the rest of the way, a pretty good rate for a team that makes every free throw an adventure. And Jenkins, who was just 6-of-16 from the field, got hot at the right time by scoring six straight points to turn a 60-58 deficit into a 64-60 lead.

Yet it somehow slipped away. And now? Now, what would have seemed like a pretty nice Christmas present two months ago—an 8-3 record—feels vaguely disappointing. And if you’re one of the folks leaping off the bandwagon today, well, Pecora can’t blame you.

“We’re the worst 8-3 team in America,” Pecora told Newsday afterward. “We need to get mentally and physically tougher.”

By benching Jenkins and Vines (I’m almost sure it was the first time this year both players were on the bench with the outcome of the game still in doubt), Pecora proved he was willing to chance losing the game to teach a lesson. Whether that lesson is absorbed over the next 10 days will determine the direction of the Dutchmen’s season.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.