February 17th, 2019: Marquette at Seton Hall

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Marquette took advantage of a short-handed Seton Hall squad on Senior Day to get back on track with a resounding 109-63 win. Natisha Hiedeman exploded for 34 points to lead the Golden Eagles, while Danielle King added 20 points and 12 assists. Desiree Elmore had 21 points and eight rebounds to lead the Hall.

For smol seniors, angry seniors, bringing a sophomore to a senior fight, celebrating seniors, and generally lots of things involving seniors, join your intrepid and unprepared blogger after the jump.

Someday I will get a game's worth of notes finished before having to move on to the next one, but today is not that day, beause today is Senior Day at Seton Hall and I have been ambushed by Feels Right To The Heart.

There are a lot of things I like about Tony Bozzella, but one of the best is the tradition he carried over from Iona (and possibly points prior, but my acquaintance with Tony started in New Rochelle) of honoring all the seniors on Senior Day. Not just players, not just managers. Everyone. So before the acknowledgement of the senior managers and the four senior Pirates, there were red roses for the six Marquette seniors, and during a timeout there were roses for the seniors in cheer, dance, and band. That is a classy touch that not enough places do, in my not so humble opinion.

At some point in the near future there will be an outpouring of feelings about Tori and Kaity and Inja and Coley, but they deserve more space than this. But I want to talk about Marquette's seniors, too, because in this amazing class I see parallels to the program-defining classes at St. John's and Seton Hall. What Allazia Blockton, Sandra Dahling, Erika Davenport, Natisha Hiedeman, Danielle King, and Amani Wilborn have done at Marquette to build that program is nothing short of astonishing, and it's been a pleasure and a privilege to watch them do so. The Big East is better when everyone is better, and while I of course want to see my Johnnies and my Pirates paste them whenever possible, I also want to see the rise of programs that care about women's basketball, that turn the corner from "well, we have to" to "yes, we want to". Build on this, Marquette. Take this opportunity with both hands and don't let it fall apart. Xavier did that. Xavier had an Elite Eight team once upon a time, and now they're the conference doormat. Don't do that.

So, yeah, it's 49-26 Marquette at halftime, and Natisha Hiedeman has expressed her opinion of both her performance against St. John's and her resultant benching with 14 points and some defensive picks that are pretty impressive for a non-football school. Seton Hall is attempting two offenses, the "force it to Shadeen" offense (which is not nearly as effective when the role of Shadeen Samuels is being played by Desiree Elmore for this performance) and the "AAAAHHH they're all taller than we are, better chuck threes!" offense, and y'all know my feelings on living by the three.

I've never had someone check my tickets at Seton Hall; as far as I know it's general admission? Worked out okay, since our season tickets do happen to be in our preferred section by the band. All the cool kids hang out with the band, don't you know?

Welp. That was a thing that happened. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, since Shadeen was out injured and Marquette had something to prove, but it felt like it was being rubbed in by the fourth quarter. I get it. Marquette is really good and we brought underclassmen to a senior fight. But at some point, you can stop letting the player with all the points jack threes. Your intrepid blogger is currently ensconced in the Chancellor's Suite in the basement of one of the on-campus buildings, which means I have no data connection, which means I am an intrepid and absolutely cut-off-from-the-universe blogger because Seton Hall is the one place I don't have the wi-fi password. I'm pretty sure Kena Richardson's family just joined our table, which, hi Kena! We were at the draft that year! Yep. And we now share the bond of being mildly embarrassed by Tony shouting us out unexpectedly in a speech.

Sandra Dahling got off the bench with about five minutes left in the game, and the best shot she had spun out of the basket; you could see how deflated Marquette's bench was when it fell out of the basket. I didn't realize she was a point guard, for some reason. Chloe Marotta got good looks in the basket in the fourth quarter, especially off of offensive rebounds. She's raw, and she has to work on her hands and feet, but she's promising as a freshman. Lauren Van Kleunen still looks like she's trying to figure out what she should be doing on the floor. She's tall, but she doesn't seem to have found a position, and that's in the tweener sense, not in the versatility sense.

I actually really liked what I saw out of Altia Anderson defensively. She needs a lot of work on her offense- she's all knees and elbows and angles- but she knows how to get her hands up and make trouble in the paint, and with all the offensive firepower Marquette has this year, maybe that's all they needed from her. She's going to need to develop more next year for them, though. Allazia Blockton still doesn't look right. She got off some shots in the fourth quarter, but overall she doesn't look right. Her confidence is missing. Her explosiveness is missing. This is a shadow of the Allazia Blockton who terrorized the Big East for three years.

Natisha Hiedeman did not start the game, presumably in response to getting schooled by the STJ defense, and proceeded to torch the everloving hell out of Seton Hall's tiny guards. She got her starting spot back for the second half and continued on her torrid pace. I swear, she was giving us trouble not just because of her height, but because of her hair. We're so short I think we were having trouble seeing over the 'fro. She seemed determined to prove her mastery over every sport in this game- she obviously proved how good she was at basketball, but she also had some mean interceptions (and Marquette doesn't even sponsor football!), set a ball out of bounds, and had two straight kicked balls. We get it, Natisha, you're good at sportsball.

So we've established that Erika Davenport is really good in the paint, right? She wasn't hitting as many of the putbacks as she did on Friday, but she was still killing us on the glass. She works around size really well, which neutralized Selena Philoxy's usual advantages, and our straight-up height was not up to the challenge of facing her. Isabelle Spingola got the start in Hiedeman's place. She shoots three-pointers really well and fairly quickly, but that seems to be her only high-level skill.

Amani Wilborn's defense and physicality are the cornerstones of her game, and her defense was especially on display in this one. She was everywhere where we were, and that was one of the many problems we had in this game. It felt like she was doing a better job of getting to the line than the box score indicates. Selena Lott had a really solid game on both ends of the floor- she had a ruthless block on Inja Butina and got buckets in transition. She's going to be really crucial for the rebuild next year for Marquette.

Marquette looked like they were out to prove they were still who they were, and I think they took it to extremes. I don't think I would have had Hiedeman jacking threes in the fourth. I would have gone to Dahling earlier. That kind of thing.

I have to be careful what I type here, because I'm still sitting in the banquet (oh my GOD TONY I'M GOING TO KILL YOU) and if the wrong person reads over my shoulder you're never going to get GNoD ever again, and there are, like, five drafts on my hard drive. But, uh. Kimi Evans sort of looked like she forgot how to shoot lay-ups out there, just flinging the ball at the basket. And she was tentative on the glass, which is unacceptable at her size. She did well boxing out, but we needed more from her and we got nothing. Whitney Howell got some minutes in the second half (apropos of nothing, I'm not feeling the new haircut) and hit a nice bucket in the lane. I'd like to see her be more aggressive, but she's a freshman. She'll learn. I think. I hope. Selena Philoxy didn't start, since we had all the smol seniors starting, but she played heavy minutes in the paint. She missed what seemed to be a lot of easy looks in the lane, but Marquette was swarming and she was under pressure.

(The tribute video is currently experiencing technical difficulties. So I'm going to leave you with this one-liner from Tony: "We don't measure success by height. Thankfully.")

Kaela Hilaire, I can't even and I am this close to ceding you back to Nassau County. KK has not played well falling behind all the seniors in the rotation, and we need her to step up her game, especially for next year when all those seniors have graduated (super graduated in some cases, I mean, jeez, Kaity, I needed five years just to get most of the way through a BA and you got the advanced degree?). I would dearly like for her to stop committing stupid fouls and start making some of those incredible drives I know she's capable of. Danielle Robinson had a pretty solid game, all things considered. She missed her shots on the inside, but she was one of the few Seton Hall players actually willing to drive the lane, which was refreshing. I like her potential. She needs a lot of work, but I think having to play more with the injuries at the end of the season has helped her develop faster than she would have otherwise this year. She's seeing minutes that aren't necessarily meaningful, but are still live-action and are against serious opponents.

Victoria Cardaci looks scared out there. I don't know if she wasn't ready to start, or if she couldn't deal with Marquette's size (such as it is) or what, but I'm trying to remember if she even got as far as the lane on most of the Pirates' offensive possessions. She made a couple of good defensive plays on the baseline, I'll give her that, but she did not look like she was able to rise to the occasion in this game. Nicole Jimenez was jacking threes, which is her strength, but it seemed like a lot of them were quick, ill-thought-out shots. I'd have to look at the quarter splits, but it feels like she threw up a lot of shots late in the game when we were just desperate for something that looked sort of like offense, and hurried threes were the best thing we could think of. And no, that is not a good thing. Kaity Healy had a nice defensive play in the first quarter and hit a couple of threes, but overall she looked really hesitant.

Desiree Elmore really looked like she was forcing it in the first half, and I'm still not a fan of the offensive style where you just force it in to one player and hope she gets hot at some point. The shots started falling in the second half,but by then we were too far down. I get that we didn't exactly have a lot of options with Shadeen Samuels out with her shoulder injury, but the plan was not working and it's not a good plan. I'm not going after her effort, don't get me wrong- she had the game we needed her to have to even stay competitive. I'm going after the game plan. Inja Butina had a better game than I thought, now looking at the box score. I guess I was just so down on our effort the rest of the night that I overlooked what she did. It did seem like she was forcing shots that she doesn't normally take or were into the teeth of Marquette's defense.

Do I think going with the four seniors as the starting lineup put us in a hole to start the game? Yes. Our seniors are all guards and most of them are very small, which left us with an imbalanced lineup. Would I have been just as upset if we had gone with our more traditional starting lineup and run Lena out there at the start of the game? No, I would have been more upset, because there are things you do on Senior Day, and one of those is give your seniors the start. Now, do I think he ran with Tori a little too long at the outset? Yeah, probably. But you do the right thing by those who have given so much to the game.

Honestly, we probably got away with more fouls than Marquette did. I'm not about to go off on the refs in a game where the margin was so ridiculous I have to do math to figure it out.

This was a perfect storm of disaster in the making. Seton Hall was short-handed, and short. Marquette had an axe to grind and a thirst to prove themselves on national television. We fell into our worst habits and Marquette took advantage. There's no shame in losing to one of the best teams in the conference and the country. But the way we did it was not the Pirate way.

But I'll say this for Walsh: the crowd never gave up, and I'm not just talking about myself and the husband. We weren't always the ones starting the chants. We weren't always the loudest people. That's what I love about Seton Hall fans. That crowd is never quiet.