By Ed Morrone
Paging Loren Stokes and Carlos Rivera to the Mack Sports Complex, Hofstra’s offense is flatlining.
OK, perhaps that’s going a little too far after just one regular season game, but still, if the old cliché of “you can only make one first impression” stands true, then the Pride men’s basketball team’s offensive unit failed in a big way in Saturday’s season-opening, 61-47 loss at Holy Cross.
Let us examine the numbers that the fans (and head coach Tom Pecora) are probably already sick of seeing. Twenty-eight points for Antoine Agudio, 19 for the nine other players that suited up in a Hofstra uniform. Nine field goals in 23 tries for Agudio, four in 26 attempts for everyone else. So far, the preseason predictions for the Pride are dead on: Agudio will obviously get his, but will (and if so, when?) will the other guys on the roster step up and get theirs?
Now, to be fair, Pecora went on record before the season began to several media outlets, including this one, saying he fully expected his team to “take a few on the chin” in the non-conference schedule. “Early pain, late gain,” is the motto the team is pursuing, the seventh-year head coach said. And keeping in the tradition of fairness, let us not forget who Hofstra opened the season against. Holy Cross, a team the Pride knocked off in a 65-64 thriller last year, went to the NCAA Tournament in March and had an 18-game home winning streak heading into Saturday’s contest. But as Robert De Niro’s character tells Al Pacino in the movie Heat, “Say there’s a flip side to that coin.”
Yes, like Hofstra, the Crusaders also lost their two best players (Keith Simmons and Torey Thomas), but you wouldn’t have guessed it since other guys stepped up. Sure, they only shot 35 percent on the offensive end, but they substituted that by making 20 of 28 free throws and allowed only three Hofstra assists the entire game. Meanwhile, Hofstra continued to struggle in taking advantage of those free points, missing 11 shots from the charity stripe en route to 58 percent.
So with all of this being said, how and when will Hofstra’s wounded offense be resuscitated?
Well, for starters, somebody aside from No. 13 will need to step up. Redshirt freshman Charles Jenkins looked fantastic scoring 17 points in the Nov. 1 exhibition game against Northwood. Against the Crusaders however, Jenkins was just 1-for-7. Greg Johnson, who had a fantastic all-around game in the exhibition, was 1-for-6 with four turnovers and just one assist on Saturday. Frontcourt players such as Arminas Urbutis and Greg Washington were literally non-factors on offense with 0 points each. And while junior college transfer Darren Townes earned 34 minutes with his physical play, he made just one of his eight free throw attempts.
“Antoine is obviously the focal point of what everyone will do defensively,” Pecora said after Saturday’s shellacking. “Now we’ve got to see who rises up.”
There is a lot to fix on Hofstra’s end, so it’s impossible to see it all being mended right away, hence Pecora’s team motto. But keep in mind the next game for the Pride is Saturday’s home opener against Manhattan, and you can bet your bottom dollar the fans in the Lion’s Den are expecting much more than what they got against Holy Cross. If Saturday is too soon, then the date to be circled can surely be Dec. 1 when the much-improved UNC-Wilmington Seahawks come to town. Once conference play starts, all of the excuses are thrown out the door.
And unfortunately for Hofstra, the rest of the conference is not going to wait for the Pride to clean up its own mess. The teams picked to finish in front of Hofstra in the preseason poll-George Mason, VCU, Drexel and Old Dominion-are all without a loss, as are Wilmington, James Madison and Towson. Keep in mind none of these teams have played an opponent of Holy Cross’ caliber (something his coaching peers said he was “crazy to open up with a game that difficult,” according to Pecora), but you get the picture. In the CAA, there’s hardly any time to slow down and figure things out, at least not if you want to be among the top 4 in the conference tournament come the first week of March, something the Pride has accomplished the past three seasons.
So if Saturday’s season opener was any indication of what is wrong with this year’s team, there’s a lot to fix and not a lot of time to do so. This most likely means Hofstra’s season could become an uphill climb, especially considering Loren Stokes and Carlos Rivera will not be walking through those ER doors anytime soon to defibrillate a dying offense.