A slow start dooms St. Joe’s in the A-10 semifinals, and a season with promise ends in the same spot
The Hawks flapped back a few times, even cutting the lead to one early in the second half, but George Mason, the fresher team with more rested legs, had every response it needed.
WASHINGTON — It is difficult to win four games in four days. It’s why securing a top-four seed in the Atlantic 10 tournament and earning the coveted double-bye to the quarterfinal round is paramount.
It shortens the math. It makes it so that a physically and emotionally taxing overtime game doesn’t have to be all that debilitating.
It was easy to see Saturday, during an afternoon semifinal at Capital One Arena, which team played a late overtime game Friday night and which team did the work during the season and got the bye to the quarterfinal in George Mason’s 74-64 dismantling of St. Joseph’s on Saturday. The Hawks never led and found themselves out yet again in the semifinal round of the Atlantic 10 conference tournament for the second consecutive season.
A season that started with so much promise ended right where last year’s finished.
When was the opening George Mason run going to end? Seven consecutive points turned to 10-0 and then 14-0. It was 18-2 before seven minutes went by. The first-half lead grew as large as 18 before St. Joe’s got its act together. The Hawks flapped back a few times, even cutting the lead to one early in the second half, but George Mason, the fresher team with more rested legs, had every response it needed. When you’ve clawed out of such a deep hole so early in the game, it makes the closing minutes that much more challenging.
“St. Joe’s probably had not as much gas in the tank as we did,” George Mason coach Tony Skinn said.
Xzayvier Brown, who willed St. Joe’s to its overtime win Friday night over Dayton, tried to do the same Saturday. His 26 points led all scorers. Erik Reynolds II, who became the school’s all-time leading scorer earlier this month, made just one of his 12 shot attempts in the last meaningful game of his college career while apparently battling an illness. Rasheer Fleming, the junior wing on his way to being an NBA lottery pick, went 3-for-11 and scored nine points while grabbing 12 rebounds.
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Sophomore Anthony Finkley, whose emergence as a fourth option has helped St. Joe’s greatly over the last two months, finished with 14 points and four steals. His defensive effort helped flip the score in the first half, but the Hawks couldn’t get over the hump. St. Joe’s had little answer inside for George Mason big man Jalen Haynes, who scored 22 points, grabbed seven rebounds, and added six assists.
Brown, who followed up a freshman of the year award last season with a first-team all-conference selection as a sophomore, said he thought the Hawks were rested enough and compared the short turnaround to playing AAU ball. It was the effort, Brown said, that was lacking early. Hawks coach Billy Lange didn’t agree.
“I think more of it is the awareness of like, OK, we’re missing shots, and you can use your defense to stay in the game,” Lange said. “I don’t ever question this group’s effort. Execution? Sometimes. Maturity? Sometimes. But our effort was there.”
St. Joe’s, so reliant on making three-pointers, connecting on just 8 of 36 shots from deep. George Mason is one of the better defensive teams in the country, and the Patriots made everything look difficult for St. Joe’s.
“Are 36 shots from the perimeter all great shots? Probably not,” Lange said. “Maybe you take six or seven back. Some are situational. And then, if you make a few, it changes. It’s a credit to them and their defense, particularly their switching and their maturity physically and then we just didn’t make some open ones that I thought really would’ve helped us in the beginning of that game.”
Later, too. It was a four-point game with more than eight minutes to go when Brown connected on a three. But George Mason answered with a Woody Newton triple and got another from K.D. Johnson after a Derek Simpson miss from three-point range. Johnson. The lead was back to 10. Then it was 12 after George Mason converted at the free-throw line following another Reynolds missed three.
St. Joe’s was in another hole, and had nothing left in the tank.
The second-seeded Patriots move on to Sunday’s A-10 championship to face top-seeded Virginia Commonwealth. The prize of winning Saturday meant facing the conference’s juggernaut in the final. It is, of course, a chance St. Joe’s would have loved to have. Its sleepy start meant it barely had a chance. The Hawks were the last team in the city — men or women — still standing, and their loss meant, officially, that the city would have no participant in the NCAA Tournament.
Coincidentally, St. Joseph’s women could keep the streak going should it secure the A-10’s at-large bid to the NCAA women’s tournament — but it’s now a three-year trend on the men’s side.
Lange said he expects St. Joe’s to get a bid to the National Invitation Tournament on Sunday.
“Less than 20% of the teams in college basketball get to the NCAA Tournament, which is sad, because that needs to change, too,” Lange said. “We’re a program that moves forward. We’re a university that’s always forward.”
There are positives to take away from the regular season. St. Joe’s won 20 games in consecutive seasons for the first time in 20 years. But the Hawks also had the talent to not have to play before the quarterfinal round. Flip one or two games from the conference slate and maybe they wouldn’t have had to. The margins, Lange knows, are slim.
“You’ll have to kind of decompress through all of it and find out tomorrow night where our destiny is and be prepared to go compete again,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it. I love coaching this group.”
It’s never too soon to start thinking about what’s next, though. Reynolds will be gone, and Fleming is likely bound for the NBA draft. But plenty of talent remains, and Lange is hopeful a talented core will remain.
“We’ll hopefully bring a lot of these guys back — you can’t say for sure anymore — and then just continue to carry this momentum into an offseason and into another season,” he said. “Our vision of being a sustainable program in a big-time league is coming closer and closer with every passing year. I think us and VCU are the only teams that have been to the semifinals the last two seasons. I think that says a lot about where we are.”
Saturday’s result did, too.
Right there, but not quite good enough.