City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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Fresh off of a double bye in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, Saint Joseph’s head coach Phil Martelli expected that his team might be rusty out of the gates in Friday afternoon’s quarterfinal against George Mason.

He was right. In the first 20 minutes, the Hawks turned the ball over six times, shot 30 percent from the field and put up just 26 points.

“I knew the first game you played, you can be a little — we were really choppy in the first half,” Martelli said. “We were just all over the place. Six turnovers in the first half is not strong basketball.”

Eleven minutes into the second half, St. Joe’s had already matched its first-half output. The Hawks went on to post a 42-point second half and rolled to a convincing 68-49 victory to lock up a spot in Saturday’s semifinals.

And having entered the weekend undoubtedly needing three wins and a conference title to keep its season a live, a resounding first win was certainly a key step in the right direction.

“It’s really important,” senior forward James Demery said. “We just take things one game at a time and stand confident to the things we’re good at.”

Ultimately, it was a string of clutch triples in the middle of the second frame that blew things open for St. Joe’s. The first came from Nick Robinson — who led St. Joe’s with 14 points — with exactly 12 minutes to play. His shot put the Hawks up by double digits for the first time, before Taylor Funk and Demery soon followed suit to push the advantage to 16.

According to Martelli, he doesn’t often see that kind of confidence out of his team when it come to long-distance shooting.

Except for Demery, that is; the senior added 12 points and seven rebounds for St. Joe’s.

“James shoots like he thinks it’s going in,” Martelli added. “But he’s probably the only one in our program that thinks the ball is going in when he shoots a three.”

While George Mason watched St. Joe’s shoot its way through a resounding second-half outburst, the Patriots in response shot just 8 percent behind the arc, effectively dying by the three.

When the first of those two three-balls went through the net with 6:28 in the first half, the Patriots still had some life, locked in a 17-17 tie amidst a 9-2 run.

After 24 minutes, another six St. Joe’s three-point makes and one switch to zone defense by Martelli, the only other George Mason triple fell with the Patriots down by 12 and under two minutes remaining in their season.

“I like to establish a man-to-man presence and then play zone on makes and misses,” Martelli said. “The second half we went exclusively zone and they didn’t make any shots.”

George Mason’s season-low three-point clip was rather confounding for a Patriots team that not only has shot better than 40 percent from deep in 12 of its games this season, but had several quality looks at the basket in Thursday’s a contest.

“There’s not a lot you can do,” George Mason head coach Dave Paulsen said. “You maybe try to move guys to different spots, which we did. I thought we played hard all the way until the end, and even cut it to nine at one point, and gosh, we just couldn’t get the ball to go down.”

It wasn’t just beyond the arc where the Patriots struggled. George Mason shot just 26 percent from the field after the break and 29 percent from the field on the game. 49 total points marked a season low for a team that averages over 70.

“I thought we had good looks from guys who made them all year, and the ball just didn’t go in the basket,” Paulsen added. “If you’re going to have a game like that, you don’t want to be in the conference tournament.”

While the Hawks’ second-half performance was sound on both ends of the floor, they’ll need a 40 minutes of it in order to extend their campaign past Saturday. Their semifinal opponent, the Rhode Island Rams, will be a significant step up in competition from George Mason with a No. 25 AP ranking.

But at this point, that doesn’t matter to St. Joe’s. The Hawks have pulled off upsets in this tournament before — see 2016 and 2014 — and will look to do so once again when they take on the Rams.

“I get it, it’s a level up. It’s a national team,” Martelli said. “All we want to do is play Sunday now. We’re playing on Saturday, and we’re playing on Saturday a lot because of our seniors.”

“We can play better,” he added. “We’ll play a lot better tomorrow.”