City of Basketball Love

By Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2025-26 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 3. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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At a critical point for the present and future of Saint Joseph’s men’s basketball, it was one of the program’s newcomers who helped keep things together. 

It was Wednesday, September 10 when the news broke on social media that Hawks coach Billy Lange was departing for an assistant coach role with the New York Knicks. For the 16 players that made up the Hawks’ roster, it was a stunning revelation just a couple weeks before the official start of preseason practices. 

“[We were] a little thrown off, honestly,” said junior forward Anthony Finkley, a sentiment certainly understated. The Hawks met as a team shortly thereafter, Lange confirming the news and turning the program over to its new head coach, former Penn head coach Steve Donahue, hired earlier in the spring as Lange’s associate head coach. 

The players met together shortly thereafter, practice scheduled that afternoon. The consensus was clear: stay the course. Leading the way in that charge, according to sophomore guard Jaiden Glover-Toscano, were redshirt sophomore Dasear Haskins and one of the program’s four transfers, Deuce Jones II. 

A New Jersey native and 2024-25 Atlantic 10 Rookie of the Year at La Salle, Jones admitted that Lange was part of the reason he came to St. Joe’s, but dealt quickly with the reality of the situation. And faced with the prospect of the entire team falling apart at the worst possible time, the one of six newcomers on the roster made his voice heard. 

“(Life) don’t stop,” Jones explained. “Somebody in your family dies, God forbid, you’ve got to keep going, that’s what they want you to do. Coach Lange left, regardless of if he’s here or not, we’ve still got a big end goal, and it’s to win the A-10.

“We’re going to continue to play hard and it’s still the same goal with coach Lange or without him,” Jones added. “We’re all still bonding, we all still got each other, we’re all in and we’re going to finish the season all-in.”

“Knowing that all the guys are bought in and committed to what we have going on, I think that was the relief we all wanted,” said Justice Ajogbor, a graduate student forward in his second year at St. Joe’s. “From talking to other people on the team, there’s a collective buy-in to St. Joseph’s basketball.”

Practice that day went ahead, as scheduled. Two weeks later, halfway through the players’ 30-day window to transfer without penalty following a coaching change, nobody has departed.

There’s no doubt, the aura around Saint Joseph’s media day was a strange one, the excitement of the start of the preseason offset by the program’s turbulent last few weeks. A good deal of the trio of press conferences — one with Donahue and one each with a quartet of returning players and a quartet of transfers — were spent on the coaching change and subsequent fallout, which to this point has been relatively minimal. 

A couple games were dropped from the schedule, the Hawks’ coaching change eliminating them from the Players’ Era Showcase, though it sounds like there’s a chance those games get salvaged in non-showcase formats. 

Donahue, who half a year ago was laid off following a nine-year run at Penn, suddenly finds himself with another chance at a Division I head coaching job, and not in an interim capacity. When St. Joe's announced the move, it was with Donahue as its boss full-stop, situation and timing coming together for the longtime Division I head coach, who’s also had stops at Cornell and Boston College. 

Despite the quick transition from Lange to Donahue, the Hawks’ new boss knows that it’s still going to be a tenuous period as he deals with 16 young men who’ve been thrown for a loop.

“I never wanted to assume that it was okay with them,” Donahue said, “because [...] it was a shock for families that send your son to come play for a certain coach, and the rug gets pulled out from underneath them.”

No matter who’s coaching this year’s Hawks, it’s a program with promise, coming off an unfulfilling season. Despite having the program’s all-time leading scorer (Erik Reynolds II), one of the best mid-major guards in the country (Xzayvier Brown) and a future NBA draft pick (Rasheer Fleming) as its top three scorers, the Hawks went 22-13 (11-7 A-10), losing at home to UAB in the opening round of the NIT as the program’s March Madness drought hit 10 years. 

That trio’s all gone. Reynolds graduated, Brown transferred to Oklahoma and Fleming is now with the Phoenix Suns. But Donahue has a deep group, including Jones, Finkley, Haskins, Ajogbor, Glover (St. John’s), Marquette transfer Al Amadou, senior guard Derek Simpson and more. It’s certainly more athleticism and raw talent than Donahue has had to work with in quite some time, and he’s gotten to spend all summer getting to know his players, an advantage he didn’t have in the Ivy League. 

Donahue said his team’s still will be different from how he played at Penn, though it’s not likely to be exactly how Lange would play. There’s a lot of frontcourt depth, with quality guards in Jones, Simpson, and former Neumann-Goretti standout Khaafiq Myers, who missed last season due to an ACL injury suffered his senior year of high school.

How this team comes out of the gate will be critical. A couple good early-season wins, and a young team can grow confidence quickly. On the flip side, a couple stumbles, and things have the potential to go downhill with everything that happened. Maintaining a positive locker room is Donahue’s biggest challenge.

“We have some team building things I want to do,” he said. “I just want to be in front of them and let them say what they have to say. I think the five months leading up to this period has made them feel comfortable around me, but I also want to be open to conversations if they have concerns.”