November 11th, 2016: Savannah State at Seton Hall

Just the Facts, Ma'am: It was shaky at times, but Seton Hall opened the 2016-2017 season with a 74-60 win over Savannah State. JaQuan Jackson led all scorers with 21 points, while LaTecia Smith added 16 points and five steals. The Tigers, who were +16 on the boards, got 19 points from Lauren Moss and a big double-double from Tiyonda Davis of 16 points and 14 rebounds.

For poor life choices, cake, so many trains and buses, driving the lane without a license, "Good hustle!", Monty Python, and coloring everything blue, join your intrepid and cerulean blogger after the jump.
It's approaching the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Take a moment to remember. This date was chosen for a reason. Look it up.

But more relevant to this blog, this is the second Friday of November, and that means the season is underway. Seton Hall starts the whole thing off in the morning, hosting the Lady Tigers of Savannah State.

Looks like there are a lot of walking wounded for this one. Martha Kuderer is still out, though she at least doesn't seem to be wearing the boot she had last week. Lubirdia Gordon and Jordan Molyneaux also seem to have not dressed. This is a rather large percentage of our height, especially veteran height. We're going to need the freshmen to be big today. I know we're playing a team we should easily beat, but we still need to show what we have. It can't be another "JaQuan scores 30 and no one else has more than 11" game. That can't become our identity.

The celebration of Seton Hall's history would be easier for people to browse through if it were available before the gates open, y'all.

Some things are just wrong. Team Valor took the pirate statue in front of Walsh. You can be assured I rectified that with the quickness. Pirate Blue, y'all.

Update: apparently Bird and Jordan are suspended multiple games, and the reason indicates that they're both idiots. I am extremely disappointed in their judgment. (And also that I may never have Seton Hall gear to match my St. John's gear.)

There appears to be cake.

Solid anthem by a ROTC cadet, but points off to the Hall for no flag corps on this Veterans Day.

At halftime, it's 42-29 Seton Hall. Savannah State is scrappy, but they have no offensive execution beyond the three-point sniping of Lauren Moss (4 treys among her 15 points). JaQuan Jackson has 10 to lead Seton Hall, but the story for the Pirates is the defensive intensity and the rebounding- clearly they got lectured after the Philadelphia game.

I think Shadeen Samuels is getting a fairly regular rooting section; there seem to be several people in Ossining gear around, and several people who get excited when she makes a big play.

The cake is not a lie! It is a fairly firm yellow sponge cake, three layers, with a white buttercream frosting and heavily dyed blue filling between the layers. Some of it got on my plate, and now my fingers are blue.

I think our lack of experience showed in this one, and I'm worried about how we're going to handle the press (which is a bit ironic, given how hard we press and trap and pressure teams). The offensive balance, or lack thereof, is also not promising. But I absolutely love this team's hustle. This is probably not going to be the year, but they're going to surprise somebody and they're going to be pretty awesome for the next couple of years (assuming, of course, no transfers or injuries).

Savannah State's colors kept throwing me off, because their bright blue and bright orange are really similar to Florida's. (And also the Mets'. Let's go Mets!) They're not a very good team fundamentally, for the most part- they threw up a lot of bad wild shots and showed very few offensive sets that indicated any deliberation.

Jacqueline Anderson and Praise Russell both entered very late in the game, after Savannah State had more or less conceded (though they were pressing to the very end, and with the margin in the low teens, I can't blame them). Caprisha Treadwell showed some nice moves, including a nice putback on an offensive rebound. I am not okay with her shoulder-blocking our point guard, though. I think Lauryn Fields was the one who committed the inbounds violation in the fourth quarter that seemed like a bit of a turning point, or whatever one calls a moment that could have been a turning point and is instead the point where something ends. She certainly seemed confused by the play. Taylor-Ashley Shaw (who has a name I would love to hear the backstory of) was especially tenacious on the ballhandler, and probably should have been called for at least more than one foul than she was. Deyja Brown was fairly late in the rotation in both halves, and I think she might have been the "teaching moment" sub, that player who comes in when someone has made a terrible mistake and needs to be told in detail what that mistake is. Kierstan Green was in and out of the game a lot, and looking at the numbers, she may have been a situational sub, brought in for a reasonable facsimile of offense. It's possible today was just a bad day for her.

Rhianna Warren got the start, but she was pulled fairly early in both halves- for Green in the first, for Shaw in the second. I wonder if she's the normal starter and if this is a coach that believes in senior privilege, or if she started because someone was in trouble. Lauren Moss has a really nice shot- she was one of the few players who had a fundamentally sound shot for Savannah State, and she was launching from deep. We lost track of her way more than we should have.

I question the fashion choices of Jeremica Edwards, specifically her choice to tuck in part of her shorts legs to create the saddlebag/sagging diaper effect. This is not a good plan for anyone. She tore away a lot of rebounds with sheer intensity, and near the end of the game she had a nifty steal. I don't have any arrows on my score card linking it to a specific scoring play, but I want to say that that's how she got the one basket near the end. Kenyata Hendrix used her slim build to slip into spaces and score. She was able to run the backdoor play better than most of her teammates. Tiyonda Davis is a whole lot of woman, and she pushed the Seton Hall defense around down low. She lacks a certain amount of finesse offensively, and she's not real quick. But she makes her own space and she can score. What stuck out most about her, though, was her really weird free throw wind-up. She dribbles like anyone else, but then she holds the ball out like she's about to address a serve in volleyball before bringing it back in to shoot. It was very easy to disconcert her during her motion, and we got a lot of practice at it.

I love Seton Hall's defense, and I love Seton Hall's hustle. There are definitely days when I want to love them with that proverbial two-by-four upside the head, and the offense is going to be a running issue. But it's hard to address the rebounding issue when three posts were unavailable. You can't really tell whether there's a problem there or not.

Chanel Jemmott came into the game very briefly in the fourth quarter, and still doesn't have a name on her jersey. I feel bad for her at this point. She should at least have a name. Skyler Snider played brief stretches in both halves- fought hard for rebounds, and got rewarded with free throws near the end of the game. I don't know if she's fast enough to keep up with the SHU defense, though. I feel like Shadeen Samuels's shot will come back in time, that she's off her timing for whatever reason. I love the way she fights for rebounds.

Deja Winters stretched the offense and seemed to get stronger as the game went on, but she's going to make me tear my hair out if she doesn't quit it with that slide-step. I think she had three travels called on that move. She's strong, and she's tough, and I really enjoy watching her play. Kaela Hilaire worked her butt off on defense- it seemed like every Savannah State possession had us shouting, "Good defense, Kaela!" or "Good deflection, Kaela!" I like her ferocity down the lane, too; it's more effective than her jumper.

Jayla Jones-Pack, at the moment, reminds me a fair bit of Tammy Sutton-Brown, and not just because of the hyphenation. Unfortunately, she reminds me of TSB at Rutgers, not TSB after Anne Donovan worked on her. Jayla's got to tuck her elbows in or she's going to spend way too much time on the bench in foul trouble. I'd also like to see her be more aggressive at the basket. Don't bring the ball down to where the guards can get at it. That goes for Claire Lundberg, too, who had a gift-wrapped lay-up handed to her by one of the guards and proceeded to utterly screw it up by taking the extra power dribble. She was called upon for a lot of interior defense today, which isn't her strength, and it showed. I'll be glad when our posts are finished being stupid and/or injured and we can put them back in the rotation so Claire can focus more on the perimeter.

I'm starting to think LaTecia Smith has played with a lot of shot-happy guards before. She has a phenomenal knack for reading long bounces off missed shots- I'd have to look at the numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if she rebounds more of JaQuan Jackson's shots than would be proportional to the number of SHU shots that Quan misses. Does that sentence make sense? She's really shown fire in this early part of the season. JaQuan Jackson has moments of incredible glory, and moments of "QUANNY WTF WERE YOU THINKING?!", but I should be used to that from a SHU scorer by now. She wasn't as aggressive on the passing lanes as she was against Philadelphia, or maybe she just wasn't as successful. I feel like sometimes she's trying too hard to make offense for herself, and not doing as much to move the ball around. I'm still not seeing it with Kaity Healy.

Lots of physical play that wasn't called, and some serious questions about which circle the officials were using for block/charge calls. I'm starting to feel like either the officiating is improving or I'm getting more jaded, though. People next to me are all "OMG THAT WAS A TERRIBLE CALL!!!111" and I'm thinking, "Uh, yes, that was a reach."

Did we scare off the few members of Bluebeard Army who showed up, or are they trying to distribute the noise across a wider area?

To the flutist getting the pep band to sing various and sundry random songs to disconcert the free throw shooter: hi, I like your taste in music, let's be friends. I want to be a lumberjack too.

...I was going to do a summation here, but I think I like that ending better.