City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Down by four with under four minutes to play after having led by as many as 11 in Saturday afternoon’s Atlantic 10 semifinal matchup with Rhode Island, Saint Joseph’s needed a stop. Desperately.

The Hawks seemed to get what they needed when senior guard E.C. Matthews missed an open look from beyond the arc. They got it again three seconds later, when senior forward Andre Berry failed to finish at the rim on a putback of Matthews’ attempt.

But when Berry’s miss caromed into the corner, Rhode Island freshman guard Fatts Russell was there to snag it and lob the ball to senior Jeff Dowtin on the left wing. Dowtin immediately fired a no-look pass to his right, to a wide open Jared Terrell, who drilled an open triple and sent his school’s fan base into a frenzy.

For the Rams, a spark. For the Hawks, a backbreaker.  

A second-half Rhode Island comeback, fueled by a string of clutch baskets and offensive rebounds, effectively brought a disappointing end to a trying St. Joe’s season, as the Rams downed the Hawks by a final of 90-87 at Capital One Arena.

“They just made the next play and the next play, and the next play,” Martelli said. “And we did the exact same thing here for about 34 minutes, and then the pounding, the physical pounding go to be too much.”

“It was the offensive rebounds,” he added.

Down the stretch, the Hawks didn’t necessarily fail to get stops. But when it came to getting some of the late 50-50 balls and hustle plays, a bevy of which came off of Rams misses, the advantage was Rhode Island’s.

On the game, the Rams had 19 offensive rebounds to the Hawks’ 11, good for 21 second-chance points, but 13 of those boards came in the second half.

In the last 12 minutes alone, as St. Joe’s watched its lead slowly erode, eight offensive rebounds by Rhode Island led to 12 second-chance points. The very last second-chance basket sealed things for good, as Dowtin hit a step-back triple off of a rebound by senior guard Jarvis Garrett to put his team up by six with 19 seconds left.

“We gave up 16 offensive rebounds last game,” Martelli said. “If that number was half, I knew we were playing tomorrow.”

About a minute into the second half, long before any kind of Rhode Island run, the mood inside Capital One Arena had been the complete opposite. St. Joe’s was up 51-40 after an impressive layup by senior guard Shavar Newkirk — who led the way with 18 points in his final game — and was shooting a blistering 57 percent from the field.

By that point, it was crystal clear the Hawks would be in a shootout — the exact kind of game Martelli had said he didn’t think favored his team after its quarterfinal win over George Mason Friday afternoon.

He had said that he thought the Hawks, in general, needed to be around the low 70s to be in the best position to win games. Instead, by the early second half, they were on track for their greatest scoring output of the season.

“I still thought it would be high 70s, because I thought both teams would bring it down,” Martelli said.

In the end, St. Joe’s tied its season-best 87 points and shot a season-high 56 percent from the field.

And lost.

“There’s going to be a point in time when I’m daydreaming this summer and I’ll say, ‘You know what, that’s pretty good,” Martelli said. “It took 90 to beat us. It took 90 to beat us. Anything short of 90, we would have won that game.”

For now, though, for obvious reasons, the defeat stings.

“We’re walking out of here having shot 56 percent against that defense,” he added. “It hurts. It hurts because we’re collecting our uniforms, but we’re not walking out here chumps. We can walk out champs.”

It marks the end of what’s been a season of retooling and reconfiguring for a St. Joe’s team that lost two of its projected starters — sophomore forward Charlie Brown and junior guard Lamarr Kimble — before the end of the season’s first game. The Hawks also spent a couple of games without senior guard James Demery, St. Joe’s second-leading scorer at 17 ppg.

Injuries continued to plague the Hawks up until the final buzzer of their final game, as Newkirk missed the last two minutes of the game after having tweaked his foot earlier in the half.

But Martelli doesn’t believe in “next man up.” He hasn’t all season, since his team simply isn’t build to fluidly replace one of its marquee athletes.

“Here, we don’t have anybody like Shavar,” he said. “We’re going to, but we don’t have anybody like him on our bench, or they would be playing, and that’s been the same all year. Like, we don’t have anybody like Charlie Brown or Fresh Kimble or James in the games he missed or Nick had missed a game. So it’s not really next man up, it’s, ‘Can this guy do enough to keep our puzzle together?’”

The good news, though, is that — while Demery and Newkirk will be graduating out of the program — Brown and Kimble will be returning to a team that clearly has enough talent to be a contender.

Despite its injury struggles, this St. Joe’s team still fought its way to a top-four seed in the Atlantic 10 and nearly found itself playing for a conference title. Aside from Demery and Newkirk, they’ll all be back for another go in 2018-19.

And even though he won’t be around for it, Newkirk expects his soon-to-be alma mater to be on the better end of this tournament in a year’s time.

“Saint Joseph’s is a championship team,” he said. “I believe that we’ll win the championship next year.”