City of Basketball Love

Teddy Bailey (@TheTeddyBailey)
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Delaware was supposed to have the day off on Wednesday.

Instead, the Blue Hens will practice the day before Thanksgiving after a free-throw shooting performance against Fairleigh Dickinson that disappointed head coach Monté Ross, to say the least.

The Hens shot an abysmal 17-of-34 (50 percent) from the charity stripe, an uncharacteristic statistic considering Delaware shot almost 70 percent in 2014-2015 with an absurd amount of newcomers in its rotation. The Blue Hens entered Tuesday’s game against Fairleigh Dickinson shooting a combined 38-of-49 (78 percent) in their first two games.

Ironically, as Ross said post-game, Delaware was able to knock down a free-throw to defeat a pesky Fairleigh Dickinson team, 73-72 to improve to 2-1 on the young season. Junior guard Cazmon Hayes was fouled from 3-point range with just 0.9 remaining in the game. Hayes, a near-70 percent free-throw shooter, missed the first two at the line before stepping up to the line and converting the third.

“Not at all,” Hayes said of having his heart-pounding during the third free-throw. “Every single one of them was the same. My thought process was the same.”

Hayes was able to draw the contact from beyond the arc due to an unselfish pass from sophomore guard Chivarsky Corbett. Corbett nearly shot a 3-pointer of his own, before finding a wide-open Hayes on the far corner. In his college career, Hayes had not been at the charity stripe with the game on the line.

“I thought I was going to make all three,” Hayes said. “I’m confident when I take any shot, but it just didn’t fall. On the last one, I knew I had to make it, there was no other option.”

“He’s always been a good free throw shooter,” Ross said of Hayes. “I don’t know if it was a lack of concentration. I thought he was going to make the third one because it would have been uncharacteristic for him to miss all three. I was a little surprised when he missed his first two.”

Ross was not pleased with how his team hurt itself with turnovers and at the free-throw line. Delaware turned the ball over 12 times on Tuesday night, a category in which the Hens are looking to improve upon in year two with Holden and Corbett in the backcourt.

Hayes attributed the free-throw woes to Fairleigh Dickinson being Delaware’s home opener in the 2015-2016 campaign after facing Delaware State and Iona on the road. Ross, though, was not buying the attribution after halftime.

“Probably because it’s the home opener,” Hayes said. “The nervousness, but there’s no reason for us to be missing free throws. I had no relief until that buzzer went off. If I made all three, we could have went into overtime at the worst. Knowing that it was possible for them to make some kind of miracle play, I wasn’t happy until the buzzer went off.”

“I would attribute that to the first half,” Ross said. “But in the second half,  it’s like being nervous before a game. You’re not going to say that you were nervous for the entire game, because that stuff goes away. They have to understand that there is a standard here that we have to live up to. That was a great win, but a disappointing performance.”

Hayes and Ross both said that Delaware shoots more free throws in practice than anyone else in the country. Each player shoots 100 free throws at the end of every practice in order to limit situations where the Blue Hens give games away, which almost happened against Fairleigh Dickinson. Delaware still won, though, and the only immediate effect of the struggles will be practice on the eve of Thanksgiving.

“We haven’t played or practiced like that all year long,” Ross said. “That was new to me. We’ve been great at the foul line.  It’s about concentration and going up there and knocking it down. I don’t know if we had half a foot out the door to Thanksgiving, but we’ll get both feet back in the door tomorrow, just to make sure.”

Just like last year, Delaware will play the majority of its non-conference slate on the road. The Blue Hens will travel down I-95 to face Temple on Sunday before returning home to play Bradley and South Florida at home. From there, Delaware’s five remaining non-conference games will be played away from the friendly confines of the Bob Carpenter Center.

“It’s hard to win,” Ross said. “People don’t realize how hard it is to win at the Division-1 level. I’m never upset after a win, but that’s not we’ve practiced and showed in the first two games. I’m disappointed, we were going to be off tomorrow, but now we’re going to practice. We have to get better, and we will get better, starting tomorrow.”