Seton Hall basketball: As Creighton visits, Pirates loving their underdog status
A simple postgame question was posed to Seton Hall basketball guard Al-Amir Dawes, who had just lit up St. John’s as the Pirates rolled to their fifth straight win before a rocking crowd at the Prudential Center.
After a two-game road swing, what’s it like to play at home?
The answer seemed like a layup.
“It feels good to be back,” Dawes said. “We had some road games and we took care of business. We’re just comfortable, we know what we can do, and know what we have to do to win.”
Hall head coach Shaheen Holloway, seated off to the side, interjected.
“No, we’re not comfortable,” he said to Dawes, loud enough for the room to hear.
Dawes glanced over his right shoulder at Holloway, nodded and cracked the slightest smile.
“Not in that way, you know,” Dawes said. “Comfortable in knowing what we’ve got to do.”
Comfortable is a dirty word to Holloway. That’s why, privately, he must be loving how the Big East’s first-place team continues to be treated like some kind of fluky interloper.
Of metrics and throat-punches
The Pirates (13-5 overall) are 6-1 in league play and have been the oddsmakers’ underdog for six of those games – it will be seven when 18th-ranked Creighton (13-5, 4-3) visits Newark Saturday (noon tip, Fox Sports 1).
Picked to finish ninth in the Big East’s preseason coaches’ poll and weighed down by struggles in the non-conference schedule, the Pirates have yet to crack the Associated Press Top 25. Heck, they’re not even in the top 50 of the NCAA’s influential NET ranking and Kenpom.com’s authoritative analytics ratings.
Bring it on, Dawes said.
“We still want to be counted as the underdogs, because they didn’t believe we could be here,” he said. “Us together, we believed. We’re not acting like we’re the top dogs now. We still want to be the underdogs and play with that chip on our shoulder.”
He’ll get his wish for a least a couple more days. Creighton is a metrics darling and has been kryptonite for the Hall in recent years (winning six of the past eight meetings). The Bluejays feature an elite rim protector in 7-foot-1 center Ryan Kalkbrenner and commit the fewest fouls in all of college basketball – a stunningly low 10.9 per game. That’s two fewer fouls than the next-closest team.
It's not an ideal matchup for a Seton Hall squad that thrives at attacking the rim and converting free throws (the Pirates are shooting 77 percent from the line, 17th nationally).
But college basketball is replete with intangibles, too. Can Creighton take a throat-punch on the road, the kind that felled UConn and St. John’s in Newark this season? The Hall tries to steal your lunch money, an apt metaphor for another part of its underdog persona.
'You gotta know me, big dog'
“I don’t think anyone in the country recruits their system better than Seton Hall,” St. John’s assistant coach Steve Masiello said after Tuesday’s beatdown. “They get guys who fit what Sha wants, and they’ve bought into it.”
Fit is the secret sauce in this sport. During the first offseason of full-fledged free agency, Holloway’s most important additions were two complementary players who know and fulfill their roles: St. John’s guard Dylan Addae-Wusu (who wasn’t exactly courted to stay by Rick Pitino) and center Jaden Bediako, who had toiled in obscurity at Santa Clara.
While coaches in well-monied programs were celebrated for stockpiling talent – think Indiana’s Mike Woodson or Arkansas’ Eric Musselman, whose teams are underwhelming – Holloway was building a more cohesive unit with a fraction of the name-image-likeness resources.
In that sense, Seton Hall is an even bigger underdog story than the metrics imply.
It’s all fuel to the fire for Holloway, and by proxy his players.
Hence the telling postgame exchange with Dawes. There was another glimpse in the same press conference, when a reporter asked Holloway if all the buzz about the Hall’s surge is changing the way he prepares his team.
The coach winced like he’d swallowed a lemon.
“No – you gotta know me, big dog,” Holloway said, his head shaking. “If you know me, you’ll understand why we’re never gonna have that mindset. Our mindset is always gonna be the underdogs, our mindset is always gonna be we’ve got something to prove, we’ve got a chip on our shoulder, never get greedy, never get satisfied, stay humble, stay low-key.”
Plenty of coaches like to play the underdog card. Holloway doesn’t play it. He lives it. Nobody in South Orange is getting comfortable anytime soon.
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. He is an Associated Press Top 25 voter. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Seton Hall basketball is underdog vs. Creighton. Pirates don't mind.
