PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Lost in the story that caught everyone’s attention on Saturday night and even Monday night in Providence is a great development on the court. While the big story is part and parcel of what’s going on, in the long run it’s not as important.
No one expected Friar guard Jeff Xavier to play on Monday night. Less than 48 hours earlier, his eye was swelled shut after a freak play when he drove to the basket and caught part of Marquette forward Joseph Fulce. Xavier was on the ground face-down and kicking, which is never a good sign. How bad was it?
“I thought my eyeball came out for a second. I thought I was holding my eyeball,” the senior guard said. “It hurt really bad, and I didn’t know what really happened. I was kind of in a dazed mode.”
Although it looked like incidental contact, which is how Xavier felt when he got to see the play later, one person didn’t agree. Xavier’s older brother, Jonathan, walked down from the stands, jumped in between two Friars on the bench and walked onto the court to talk to an official about the play. Thankfully, the incident didn’t turn into anything remotely serious.
Xavier said he still felt a lot of pain on Sunday, but when he woke up on Monday morning, he knew he would play. He was cleared later in the day and started the game, and received a huge ovation from the Friar faithful when announced as a starter. Again, no one expected this.
“I never would have guessed that he would have been able to play tonight for one minute,” said head coach Keno Davis. “From everything that we had heard yesterday, it was going to be Thursday was doubtful.”
Xavier didn’t have a big game, but there’s no question his presence alone lifted the team. More importantly, for the second straight game, the Friar offense had a different look and better results. This time, it led to a victory, as the Friars knocked off Cincinnati 72-50.
For a lot of non-conference play, Providence lived and died by the three-point shot. They settled for those shots all too often early in a possession, not even working the ball to get a shot in the flow of the offense. The ball almost never went inside-out. On occasion, a few players would slash and make things happen, but there was never any consistency to it.
On Saturday, there was clearly an emphasis on getting the ball inside. That should be just about any team’s plan against Marquette, a team with three terrific perimeter starters but a question mark inside. The Friars would drive and even make entry passes inside, and they scored 32 of 45 first-half points in the paint for a five-point lead, and kept that going in the second half to build a 13-point lead. They lost the game largely because of key turnovers down the stretch and an inability to keep their momentum.
Against Cincinnati, the same emphasis on going inside was there. More often, it came from dribble penetration, and they made several excellent interior passes. They kept attacking, and when it was all said and done they scored 50 of their 72 points in the paint. Cincinnati had just 24 in the paint.
In fact, there was a point in the second half where the Friars seemed to be reverting to their old form of settling for three-pointers. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work for them, and Cincinnati was able to stay within striking distance. Then Randall Hanke came into the game and became a force inside.
Hanke scored 15 points on 7-7 shooting, as the Friars kept finding him inside and on the break a couple of times. The senior big man knows how to finish, as he’s converted nearly 68 percent of his shots over his career, so it’s clear that getting the ball to him might be a good idea.
He wasn’t alone. Jonathan Kale scored 14 points on 5-6 shooting, all but one coming right near the basket. The emotional leader of the Friars, he’s not a guy they count on for scoring, but if he gets the ball in close, he’s capable of scoring.
Notice a pattern here? Get the ball inside, and good things can happen.
“I think what we’ve found is that we’ve got an ability to score in different ways and win a ballgame in different ways,” said Davis. “We can shoot the three, we can rebound, we can go inside, we can drive, we can penetrate.”
Going inside can work for their athletic wings as well. It’s been well-established that Weyinmi Efejuku, who’s playing with a heavy heart after the recent passing of his father, is more than athletic enough to score on slashes, and Brian McKenzie and emerging Marshon Brooks can do so as well. If they establish themselves that way, it can only help open up opportunities to shoot it from long range.
The last two games have shown that the Friars can be effective and even win when they get the ball inside to try to score. As much as it helped to have Xavier back in the lineup after what happened two days earlier, the bigger development is the offensive change. They got a boost Monday from Xavier’s return, but the new offensive emphasis will boost them as long as they keep that up.
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