Saint Joe’s Basketball: Season quickly slipping away from slumping Hawks
By Pan Karalis
Saint Joe’s basketball was expected to be a contender for the Atlantic 10 title, but their start to the conference season has gone worse than anyone imagined.
The expectations for Phil Martelli’s squad were sky-high heading into the 2018-19 season. Two of their most talented players, Charlie Brown and Fresh Kimble, sat out most of last year with injuries and were set to return healthy to join Taylor Funk, who had a breakout freshman season on his own a season ago, to make a serious run at an Atlantic 10 title. After finishing fourth in the league a season ago without Brown and Kimble, the conference’s coaches picked the Hawks to finish second behind a loaded St. Louis team.
And the season started as well as anyone could have expected; St. Joe’s dominated a strong Old Dominion team to open the year, and went down to Myrtle Beach and beat Wake Forest by 20. They did get a reality check when they were unable to compete with much bigger UCF and kept up with a decent West Virginia side before falling to 3-2, though.
The first serious blow to the Hawks came a game after they left Myrtle on a visit to William & Mary. They opened up a 20-point second half lead against the Tribe before seeing it disappear and losing by two, 87-85. Things were shaky for Saint Joe’s when they returned home to play UIC a few days later, but a late run gave Saint Joe’s the comfortable win they were expecting at home, avoiding what would have been a disaster dropping consecutive games to low-major competition.
The non-conference season would finish up and down for Saint Joe’s, dropping Big 5 games to Villanova and Temple but finishing the calendar year on a 3-1 run. The cracks had already begun to form for the Hawks, though. Despite the returning talent and the perhaps unexpected contributions from freshman starter Jared Bynum, Saint Joe’s had significant issues on the defensive side of the ball, especially defending the three. And once the threes stopped falling at a consistent clip for the Hawks on the offensive side, they’ve had trouble finding scoring with Phil Martelli’s stagnant offensive schemes.
The Atlantic 10 season has started as poorly as possible for Saint Joe’s; they’ve dropped their first two conference games, both at home at Hagan Arena, by double digits. George Mason topped them by a shocking 25 points and George Washington beat the Hawks by 14. Saint Joe’s hasn’t scored more than 60 points since beating Princeton on Dec. 5th, and they’ve shot below 25% from three, a supposed strength for the Hawks, in four of their last five contests.
They’ve become one of the worst teams in the country at defending the three, and their inability to compete on the glass and ineffectiveness moving the basketball (they’re 317th in the country in total assists) have sank Saint Joe’s season before mid-January. KenPom projects them losing their next four games, which would put them at 0-6 before hosting a beatable Richmond team on the 23rd. Calls for the firing of Phil Martelli, the 24th year head coach of the Hawks that led the program to an undefeated regular season in 2003-04 and 7 NCAA tournament appearances, have amplified.
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But there is still plenty of basketball to play, and this talented Saint Joe’s squad has time to turn their season around. Hope for an at-large bid is gone, but the Hawks can beat any Atlantic 10 team on any given night. They have enough talent for a deep run in the A10 tournament, and this is still a young group. While these results might not have been expected, some growing pains certainly were.