The offense finally arrived for Seton Hall basketball, but the defense has disappeared.
The Pirates rallied from 13 points down to pull within two in the closing moments at Butler Wednesday, but fell 82-77 to a Bulldogs squad that had lost nine straight games.
Postgrad guard Chaunce Jenkins tallied 21 points and four assists to pace Seton Hall (6-11 overall, 1-5 Big East), which had beaten Butler (8-10, 1-6) six straight times.
As in Saturday’s 91-85 loss at Providence, the Pirates filled up the stat sheet but failed to get stops, a reversal of how they performed throughout the non-conference schedule. They’ve now yielded 80-plus points in four straight games, three of them against the Big East’s lesser squads.
The Hall now leads the Butler series 14-11 and had prevailed in eight of the past 10 trips to historic Hinkle Fieldhouse – 6-2 against the Bulldogs and 2-0 in last year’s NIT.
“We’re not defending,” Hall coach Shaheen Holloway said during his postgame radio interview. “All of a sudden we think we’re going to outscore people – we think we’ve become the Golden State Warriors. I’m not putting up with it no more. It’s super frustrating to coach this team.”
3 THOUGHTS
1. Missing Dylan Addae-Wusu
The postgrad guard, who didn’t make the trip due to a foot injury, is more essential than casual onlookers give him credit for. As enigmatic as he can be offensively, Addae-Wusu is the Pirates’ best perimeter defender.
In his absence, Butler shot 51 percent from the field and turned it over just eight times.
The other game Addae-Wusu missed this season was the rock-bottom loss Monmouth. That’s not a coincidence.
2. Bigs come up small – again
Tough to compete when your biggest players produce little game-in, game-out. Manny Okorafor, Yacine Toumi, Gus Yalden and Godswill Erheriene had as many fouls (11) as rebounds (11), not to mention just nine points in 44 minutes between them.
It hurt that Prince Aligbe, who has been punching above his weight at 6-foot-7, was in foul trouble all night and managed just 15 minutes (he logged 12 points on 5-of-7 shooting and grabbed four boards).
Butler outscored the Hall 11-4 in second chance points, a margin that provided decisive.
It’s too early to say whether the Pirates whiffed on all four of their traditional bigs — Yalden is a redshirt freshmen and Ehreriene is a true freshman — but collectively speaking, the program has not rolled out a frontcourt this deficient in decades. (The early Bobby Gonzalez years were lean up front, too, but John Garcia was a bulldog even on one leg).
3. Coleman hits the wall
The All-Big East tear by sophomore wing Isaiah Coleman hit a wall in Hinkle Fieldhouse. He managed just 11 points and two rebounds in 29 minutes and surprisingly was on the bench during crunch time, probably because Holloway was displeased with his defense (to his credit, he was cheering on his teammates hard from his seat).
Coleman and Jenkins haven’t been able to consistently put together strong outings in the same game, and that’s been an issue for a team with limited other options.
3 QUOTES
From Holloway’s postgame radio interview with Dave Popkin:
On the defense: “Some guys are just playing for stats. I’ve got a guy, I’m not saying names, he hasn’t defended in three games. Three games. And that’s not his character. It’s not. But that’s kind of where we are right now and that’s what losing does.”
On shooting 9-for-16 from 3-point range: “Shooting 25-plus threes, that’s fools gold. Taking 16 threes, hitting nine, that’s good basketball. But we had a lot of opportunities to hit easy shots. We’re working on the mid-range shot because a lot of teams are just dropping (on defense). When we’re doing it (in practice), some guys go hard with it and some guys don’t go hard with it. When we have it in the game and it’s there, but you don’t practice it and it’s not muscle memory like it should be, you come up short a lot. We had a lot of great looks. We just didn’t cash in.”
On Scotty Middleton (14 points, 4-4 from 3-point range in 32 minutes): I want Scotty to do more than shoot jump shots, because I think he can do more than that. He’s shooting threes and he made some tonight, but he should be comfortable now playing a lot of minutes, starters’ minutes, and just giving us some more.”
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.