By Ed Morrone
For the Hofstra men’s basketball team, Saturday’s season opener was a tale of two halves. Pride fans can only hope the second half is a sign of things to come in this much-anticipated season.
Hofstra answered an 18-point first half deficit with a 53-point second half, but by then the team had dug itself too deep of a hole, falling 88-82 at Halton Arena to UNC-Charlotte. Loren Stokes scored 24 points and Antoine Agudio added 22 for the Pride (0-1), but the team missed 11 free throws that severely hampered a second half surge in which it outscored the 49ers, 53-41.
“We turned the ball over 10 times [in the first half], and it’s not in our way to do that,” Hofstra head coach Tom Pecora said. “And I thought we played selfishly, and that’s the first time that’s been the case with this group.”
The Pride shot just 34.5 percent in the first half (10-for-29) and tallied 10 of the 12 turnovers in the first 20 minutes. Charlotte, meanwhile, shot 53 percent in the first half.”We couldn’t make any shots,” said senior guard Carlos Rivera, who shot a brutal 3-for-14 for the game. “They had a great game and shot 50 percent the whole game and didn’t miss, but I don’t think we played the defense we’re capable of in the first half.”
The Pride came roaring out of the gate in the second half, scoring the first 13 points and temporarily knocked a boisterous crowd of 6,281 screaming Charlotte fans out of it.
However, Hofstra could never get over that final hump. The Pride shot 51.5 percent in the second half, but the 49ers continued their dynamite shooting, tallying a 55 percent dead eye mark in the second half, with many of the shots being circus ones right when Hofstra was trying to get back into it.
“It’s hard to come back when you’re playing a good team like Charlotte,” Stokes said. “It was hard to fight back, but we just learned from that game that we have to play hard from the beginning.”
One of the biggest red flags raised from the opening game was the Pride’s inability to hit free throws. Stokes missed four in going 7-for-11, while Agudio stunningly missed more than he made (5-for-11). On the flip side of that coin, Charlotte (1-0) converted on 72 percent of its free throws, including a perfect 12-for-12 from guard Leemire Goldwire, who along with teammate De’Angelo Alexander, led the 49ers with 26 points.
As a result, Pecora had the team running sprints after every missed free throw in practice on Tuesday, something he hopes will help the Pride over the hump and give the players confidence when they head to the line down the stretch.
“Every time we do free throw in practice, we do pressure situations,” Pecora said. “Then the guys come in voluntarily and shoot 200 free throws on their own every night, so that helps them in getting some repetition. Now, we’ve got to make them with the lights on. We had our numbers into the low 70s [percent] last year, which was respectable.”
Pecora and Pride fans can only hope the drills are working, because free throw shooting is a terrible Achilles heel for a team to have, especially a team that is supposed to get to the NCAA Tournament. Still, the second-half comeback was encouraging and showed more of what this Hofstra team is capable of.
The road will not get any easier for the Pride, a team still playing without its best big men in Chris Gadley (concussion) and freshman Greg Washington (eligibility issues). Hofstra will travel to Manhattan College on Saturday, before embarking to the Land of the Midnight Sun for the Great Alaska Shootout over Thanksgiving break.
“It’s not about Manhattan, it’s about Hofstra,” Rivera said. “It doesn’t matter who the opponent is. We have to come hard and play the way we’re capable of playing.”
For Rivera and the Pride, a solid first half on Saturday is a must, or else this team could fall into an unfathomable 0-2 hole.
Free throw shooting and turnovers were costly for Stokes and the Pride.