By Aidan Joly
Having watched Shaheen Holloway’s St. Peter’s teams on a semi-regular basis the past few years, it was easy to tell that Holloway’s emphasis as a coach was having his teams clamping down on defense.
When he was hired to be the head coach at Seton Hall after guiding the Peacocks to the Elite Eight, it was fair to wonder if that style would translate to the Big East.
It’s only one game against a mid-major opponent, but that style certainly translated in Wednesday’s opener for the Pirates, ending in a blowout 79-52 win against a familiar opponent in Monmouth.
After kind of a slow start, the Seton Hall defense really clamped down on Monmouth, forcing turnovers and turning that into instant offense. Seton Hall forced 23 Monmouth turnovers and scored 26 points off of them.
In addition to that, Monmouth scored just 17 points in the first half, allowing the Pirates to jump out to a 19-point lead at the break. The second half was a bit closer with Monmouth scoring 35 points, but some of those points came in garbage time.
Taking a look at the shooting numbers, Monmouth shot a measly 29.8% from the field, 17-57 and were 2-20 from behind the three point arc. Yes, it’s a very young Monmouth team that lost a lot of players to graduation and the Hawks were playing in their opener as well, but those numbers are staggeringly low. It’s worth noting that 16 of Monmouth’s points came from the free throw line as well.
Just to touch on some specific players, the freshman duo of Tae Davis and Jaquan Sanders both played well, Davis scoring 11 points on 5-7 shooting while grabbing eight rebounds and dishing out five assists, while Sanders hit a pair of triples. It has been a while since Seton Hall has had a pair of impact freshman, or even just a single impact freshman – you could probably go with Myles Powell’s 10.7 points per game in the 2016-17 season for that answer – and it is possible that Davis and Sanders could provide that to them and be staples on this team for years to come.
This was only game one for Seton Hall too and there were even times during the game where the unit looked discombobulated. It’s a group still learning to play together and nonetheless still put up a very strong performance.
As always, the Big East is deep this year, especially in the middle of the pack. However, if things continue to progress in a solid manner, especially with some good non-conference tests in Iowa, Memphis, Kansas and Rutgers still to go, Seton Hall should be expected to be in the top half of that league.
AJ Hoops 