Hawks Are Right There Once Again
PHILADELPHIA – The 2004-05 media guide for St. Joseph’s has the words “In Transition” on the cover. This season isn’t supposed to be a carbon copy of the magical 2003-04 season, when the school was the talk of the country as their basketball team completed a perfect regular season, but the Hawks didn’t project to be doormats, either.
The transition looked like it might be painful early on, as the Hawks suffered a 91-51 thrashing at Kansas to start the season. That may have prompted some to write off last season as a complete fluke and leave this year’s team for dead, and any such talk was surely aided by a loss to Drexel in the Big Five Classic, then four straight losses to close the month of December. Early on, head coach Phil Martelli saw the effect of the start on his team.
“You just saw how they reacted,” he said when asked how they responded after the season-opening thumping. “To me it’s the same thing. I think they’re still not confident, and they still don’t have enough of a ‘cover each other’s backs’ mentality.”
The Hawks have come back and found new life, and certainly new confidence. Saturday’s 73-54 win at Massachusetts moves them to 8-7 on the season and 5-1 in the Atlantic 10. They won their first four games before blowing a second-half lead at Dayton earlier in the week, but rebounded with Saturday’s win in which they led throughout after allowing the first basket of the game.
Martelli has always been a straight shooter who cares most about results, and neither winning nor losing changes that. He stressed the bottom line last season, when they were perfect in the regular season but had numerous detractors who felt they were not that good. So it wasn’t a surprise when last month, he didn’t care that a couple of his players seemed to be playing well; the record was all that mattered.
“To me, you’re 1-2, and everybody’s 1-2, so I don’t want to hear that anybody’s doing a good job,” Martelli said after the loss to Drexel dropped them to 1-2.
The Hawks have been winning with defense and especially of late, as they lead the Atlantic 10 in scoring defense and have held every conference opponent under 60 points. That has been a barometer of their success this season, as they are 1-5 when their opponents score 60 or more points. Martelli and the players know they don’t have the kind of offense they had last season, so defense has to be the emphasis and they have to win with it.
“We can’t turn the ball over – we don’t have the offense – so we have to take every play like it’s our last,” junior center Dwayne Jones said.
After missing a month in the early going due to a dislocated shoulder, senior Pat Carroll came alive and is again shooting the ball well to lead the offense. He is shooting just under 42% on three-pointers, which places him third in the conference, but since his first three games back he is shooting nearly 50% from behind the arc. Carroll’s resurgence mirrors that of the team, evidenced by Carroll’s 16.5 points per game average in conference games.
“He now is thoughtful – he’s curling, he’s reading screens,” Martelli said. “People ask, what’s the difference, where have you changed from being 3-6? We now screen. We didn’t have to screen for years because we could just find open spaces and play off the dribble.”
Carroll isn’t alone in picking up his play as the team has. The biggest hole for the Hawks was unquestionably at the point, and not just because Jameer Nelson was the nation’s player of the year. Lee entered the season having averaged just 7.8 minutes per game his first two seasons, thus he was very inexperienced even though he went up against the likes of Nelson, Delonte West and Tyrone Barley every day in practice. Lee had some struggles early on, but in conference play his assist/turnover ratio is 2:1. For a while, Martelli thought he was trying to do too much, but now the big concern is different.
“Dwayne has more confidence,” he said. “The thing that’s the biggest concern is the number of minutes that he’s playing, it could wear on a guy. He’s certainly playing with a degree of confidence that helps our team, and he knows that he’s needed.”
Lee is needed more than expected because a consistent contributor hasn’t emerged between the other point guard candidates, freshmen Abdullai Jalloh and Pat Calathes. Jalloh started the season opener, but had no assists and 2 turnovers in 23 minutes and has not played as many minutes since then. Calathes simply doesn’t seem suited to the point guard position and also lacks quickness, though at 6’10” and having the length he has, he certainly would present a matchup problem there.
A big part of the change in this year’s team is the need for offense from the frontcourt. The post players need to be involved as shooters like Carroll and Chet Stachitas move without the ball to get open, but they need to be more than decoys since the team is not full of scorers. Jones has emerged at the offensive end, as the junior center was always a solid defender but is now scoring nearly 11 points per game to go with just under 11 rebounds and nearly three blocked shots per game; he leads the conference in the latter two categories. On Saturday, he record his eighth double-double of the season with 11 points and 11 rebounds. He went to the Pete Newell camp over the summer and also worked separately on his free throw shooting, an important facet of the game for a post scorer. He shot just 41% from the line as he did his first two years but has improved to over 58% from the line this season.
“We got to step up” Jones said. “We lost about 40 points from last year’s team, so everybody has to step up, and I think everybody has so far and I’m getting a lot more opportunities.”
The early struggles did not include Philadelphia Big 5 games, which are naturally important to the team. They won their only game thus far, a recent 73-38 thumping of LaSalle, and have their next one on Tuesday night at Pennsylvania. There’s no reason to think they can’t win it again this year and also achieve the loftier goal of winning the Atlantic 10. The winning has started again, helped by being in the familiar territory of the Atlantic 10, and the Hawks are probably the favorites at this point.
Martelli is happy with the team’s 5-1 start in the conference, and confident about them going forward. Massachusetts head coach Steve Lappas said that the Hawks know how to win, and that certainly counts for something. The Hawks may be in transition, but it looks as though the hardest part of that is over and that has the players excited.
“It’s starting to get fun again,” Jones said. “We were 3-6, we were down, but our coaches did a good job of picking us up and getting us on a little win streak. We had a bump against Dayton, and now we just want to start another streak and have fun with the season.”
