November 7th, 2015: Philadelphia at Seton Hall

Just the Facts, Ma'am: A slow start for both teams developed into a 71-47 Seton Hall win over Philadelphia University in the Pirates' first game of the year. Tiffany Jones led Seton Hall with 16 points and eight rebounds. Rachel Day had 12 points for the Rams.

For failure to communicate, disallowed shots, sore muscles, missed connections, and superficial analysis, join your intrepid and diverted blogger after the jump.


Good afternoon! It's that time of year again- college basketball has returned. Sure, it's only the preseason, and it's not a D-I opponent, but it's good to be back where everyone knows your name (or at least your husband's nickname). The trusty laptop and I are once more ensconced in our familiar place in section 4, behind the Seton Hall bench on the hard wood bleachers of Walsh Gymnasium. This time, I brought a cushion. I learn eventually.

The trip is always long, but PATH made it an extra twenty minutes longer. We left home a little before 10:30 to get to Seton Hall at 1:20. Insanity.

Going through Newark is always depressing. The lines of demarcation between the carefully tended neighborhoods and the ones less cared for are sharp and clear; you go half a block, maybe a little more, past the Prudential Center on Market Street, and you've gone from artisanal pizza to swathes of empty storefronts. Get off at Dover Street on the 31, and in two blocks you go from plexiglass barricades in the stores to the graceful houses of South Orange Village. Even University Heights, so shiny and new, comes off as sterile, or possibly sterilized, a place where people perform the activities of daily living without actually living.

I don't know if I could live in poverty, with the constant presence of wealth hovering so close and yet so far, without falling into rage and the urge to destroy something.

Philadelphia needs to update their gear. That's a very old Reebok logo.

Pocket schedules are simple this year, but the posters are nice.

I don't know if I like the quarter system for college basketball. I'm used to it from the WNBA, but I sort of miss long periods of play. Well, it is what it is.

At halftime, Seton Hall is up 42-29 on Philadelphia. Shooting was bad by both teams in the first quarter. Offense has picked up some in the second quarter, Philadelphia by finding open jumpers, Seton Hall by applying the backcourt trap and getting fired up by their defense. The seniors are making noise for the Hall, with 11 points for Tiffany Jones and 8 for Tabatha Richardson-Smith. Jessica Kaminski has 9 for Philadelphia (though it should be 8, that three was clearly on the line).

The game was definitely better than the travels and travails it took to get there. It's 6:10 right now, and I'm still in Manhattan. Transit has been madness, whether it's construction and signal issues on PATH or a police investigation on the J. We've walked around, rerouted, rerouted again, and finally gotten on a train that will get us to a bus that will get us to a long walk home.

So there are definitely things to look forward to for the Hall, and a couple of things to worry about. I don't know how good Philadelphia is going to be this year, but their two big shooters today were a redshirt freshman and a sophomore.

Philadelphia really didn't go deep into their bench for most of the game. The Rams emptied their bench late in the game, so we got brief glimpses of Valez Jackson, Alicia Lister, and Regan Marriner. None of them did anything of note. Jessica Kaminski would be a much more lethal scorer if she had a better sense of where the three-point line was; most of her shots were very close to the three-point line, and usually on the wrong side of it. It's the same issue I have with Essence Carson, only she wasn't even on the line most of the time. Jackie McCarron apparently played in the first half, but you can tell how much of an impression she left if I thought her first appearance was in the second.

An outside jumper is a very useful weapon for a post player, especially one with a stocky build who thus becomes less of a suspect in the ownership of a soft outside shot. That being said, Mary Newell seemed to rely more heavily on it than she should, which was a shame, because she seemed to have good moves around the basket, or at least the ability to make points happen in the vicinity of the basket. Tori Arnao was mostly shut down, and her shots seemed to get wilder as the game wore on. She did a good job boxing out and setting screens for her teammates.

Bria Young has a lot of speed and a lot of aggression, but not a lot of sense- she got nailed at the halfcourt line a lot, and showed a distressing tendency to stop there as if waiting for the trap to come. Rachel Day has a really pretty three-point shot that we saw entirely too much of, because she was able to use screens and get herself free. Kelsey Jones left minimal impression- she came off as someone who's very tough, but didn't necessarily have any occasion to use it. That happens sometimes.

Philadelphia seemed to panic as the game went on and the lead got bigger. There were a lot of bad shots thrown up just for the sake of having a shot up. They rallied a bit late, but very late, when Seton Hall had been up by 20 for much of the half.

Seton Hall has a lot of freshmen. That's to be expected, with the number of scholarships freed up from last year, whether by graduation or by attrition. We didn't get to see much of Kaity Healy, or Martha Kuderer (AKA McLaughlin; there was apparently some kind of issue with her jersey, so she was wearing a different name and number). LaTecia Smith put in some time at point guard, and I think she's got a lot of potential. The one glaring thing that stood out to me was clock awareness, or lack thereof. That might not be the right phrase; an inability to manipulate the clock might be closer. She's not going to hold the ball to run out the clock or to keep the opponent from having extra time on offense; she's not going to set up for one last good shot. Other than that, I like her. She's a freshman; she'll learn. The freshman who impressed me most was the forward Taylor Byrne. She needs to work on her stamina and conditioning, but for a freshman in her first college game, that's to be expected. I like her hustle, I like her shot, and I like her communication on the floor. She looks to be a very useful player already, and someone we can rely on in later years.

Jordan Molyneaux appears to have lost any court vision she had during her abbreviated season last year. I like what she does defensively on the inside (that foul was totally a clean block!) but I expected a little more out of her. Maybe she's just rusty, though. Jordan Mosley made some good moves on defense. Claire Lundberg's threes had a nasty habit of rimming out. Tara Inman gave up her body on defense. I love to watch her work on defense.

Shakena Richardson reminds me of Temeka Johnson, only slightly stretched out- not quite as stocky, a little bit taller, but strong for her size. She overthrew a couple of shots in ways I wasn't expecting. It's going to take a while for her to develop a rapport with her teammates, but I think she'll get there. I like her slashing ability to the hoop. Aleesha Powell has a lot of speed, and I love when she cuts off an opponent's angle. Again, some rough edges need to be filed off on team chemistry, but we're only in the preseason, and that's what you do in the preseason: you figure out what needs to be fixed.

Tiffany Jones had herself a game, hitting threes and pulling down boards. I always get a little weirded out when posts get comfortable beyond the arc, but if she can consistently hit that shot, I'm okay with it. Lubirdia Gordon couldn't hit a bunny all night, and it seemed like she had more of them than the box score shows (though she was fouled on some attempts, and I suppose some attempts never got sufficiently close to the basket to be considered shots). She pulled down the boards, but the boards don't do you much good if you can't convert them. She also seemed to not be communicating with the guards. Look down, Bird- they're there, I swear. And now we're getting to the part that I don't like writing, because I want only good things for Tab, even when she gives me the I Am Disappointed In Your Life Choices staredown. But Tabatha Richardson-Smith has a recurring case of recto-cranial inversion, and it flared up in the second half of this game. I love to watch her shoot. I love when she hits the boards. She's got the skills and the build to take that next step. But she knows it too, and sometimes I think she believes her own hype. And if you do stupid things on the court, and your coach gets upset with you for doing stupid things on the court, you don't ignore him. You don't act like you're not taking the game seriously (even if you're not- pretend to care).

The crew chief seemed very concerned with the small details of fashion today, since that was something she could enforce with any reliability.

This is not the team that went to the tournament for the first time in ages. This is something different- there's promise, but there are definitely rough patches. Communication is the key.