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For second straight year, La Salle can't quite solve the puzzle

03/13/2015, 1:00pm EDT

By Garrett Miley

Garrett Miley (@GWMiley)
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La Salle was one of the more puzzling teams in college basketball this season. Explorers head coach John Giannini would certainly agree.

With an experienced core of the roster, the Explorers had relatively lofty expectations placed upon them heading into the 2014-15 season. They were selected by the coaches to finish in the top half of the Atlantic 10 conference in the preseason poll, and the additions of Jordan Price and Cleon Roberts were supposed to be impactful.

And at times they were. Price led the Explorers in scoring and was one of the best at putting the ball in the basket in the Atlantic 10 this season.

But the real heart of this La Salle team was in the post. The Explorers had arguably the second-best frontcourt duo in the city, behind only Daniel Ochefu and JayVaughn Pinkston at Villanova, with seniors Steve Zack and Jerrell Wright.

Wright, a 6-8 power forward from Philadelphia’s Dobbins Tech, has been a force for the Explorers since his freshman season, when he averaged 9.8 ppg and 5.6 rpg. In four years, he scored over 1,500 points and grabbed nearly 850 rebounds, but his best year came as a sophomore, when he averaged 13.3 ppg and 6.6 rpg.

Zach, a 7-footer out of Red Land (Pa.), started his career off as a stiff big man, but made huge strides throughout his career to average 8.2 ppg and 9.0 rpg as a senior. He finished his career with over 750 points and over 830 rebounds.

“I have to admit I that I’m taken with them personally and I play them all the time because I believe in them,” Giannini said before the Atlantic 10 Tournament. “They’re not perfect and I get on them, but I love them to death and I love coaching them and I really believe in them. I’m attached to them largely because of that winning experience they have”

They were mismatch problems for most teams in the Atlantic 10, especially Davidson, but La Salle couldn’t put it all together to use their advantage in the post.

Like their tenure at La Salle, Wright and Zack showed flashes against the top-seeded Wildcats in the Atlantic 10 quarterfinals. The first 18 Explorer points came from their senior frontcourt and they propelled La Salle to a lead as large as 18.

It just wasn’t enough.

“Our seniors were absolutely amazing,” Giannini said after the crushing, 67-66 loss. “The stats show that. Your eyes could have seen it. They played with incredible effort and pride and togetherness, and they displayed everything that a coach appreciates and admires. Of course, they have been great all four years. So you know, I can’t say enough them or our effort or the effort of both teams.”

But, all a college basketball player wants in their senior season is to win basketball games. Zack and Wright were on the cusp of at least one more sweet sip of victorious nectar in the waning seconds, before Davidson’s Tyler Kalinosky broke hearts.

Zack finished with a career-high 24 points, a feel-good milestone in almost any other scenario. But not for Zack, not like this.

“I can’t think about that right now,” he said. “Just, my career is over on a buzzer beater and we had a chance to win. That doesn’t matter right now.”

Both Zack and Wright were major contributors on La Salle’s 2013 team that made a truly Cinderella-esque run into the Sweet 16 behind Ramon Galloway’s scoring and Tyrone Garland’s infamous “Southwest Philly Floater.”

That was the highest of the highs.

La Salle seemed like, just maybe, they were putting it all together in time for the postseason. After an upset of UMass in their opening game, beating Davidson hardly seemed out of the question.

“I think our last two games showed that we are capable of more than what our final record indicates,” Giannini said. “And I don’t know why we didn’t perform a little bit better at times, because we do have good kids who would want to be successful. And I do think that we work them and taught them as best as we could. So whatever we were lacking in, it wasn’t attitudinal or in terms of the work we put in. We are certainly lacking of something; the things that we were lacking I’ll probably keep to myself.”

So what were the Explorers lacking?

We may never know, and it might not be fair to assume or infer.

But the Wright and Zack era will always be defined by promise and potential. Just as it seemed like the Explorers were putting it all together, the clock ran out.