Atlantic 10 Basketball: George Mason rising among key weekly takeaways
By Stu Luddecke
1. Saint Joe’s still has a pulse
Saint Joe’s performed one of the most incredible disappearing acts of the twenty-first century at the beginning of conference play. After being picked to finish second in the Atlantic 10 coaches’ poll and displaying relatively good basketball in the non-conference slate, they proceeded to get absolutely steamrolled by George Mason on A10 opening night. They followed that up with losses to struggling George Washington and Saint Bonaventure squads by 14 and 26 points, respectively.
A dumpster fire was the only appropriate analogy that could be used to describe the team that had so recently been highly respected, even feared. For whatever reason, they just couldn’t put the ball in the basket, their vaunted offense with weapons like Taylor Funk, Lamarr Kimble, and Charlie Brown mysteriously dropping final scores in the 40’s and 50’s (they scored exactly 60 at George Mason).
Related Story. Next man steps up at Hawk Hill. light
They showed some signs of life in their 85-84 shootout loss to Duquesne, but as luck would have it, forward Pierfrancesco Oliva (5.6 rebounds per game) went down for the year with a heart-rending leg injury, and star point guard Lamarr Kimble (16.3 points per game) was sidelined indefinitely with a broken hand. A terrible start to conference play was bound to only get worse, right? Wrong.
See, the first thing that needs to be understood about this year’s Atlantic 10 is that anything that one expects to happen is almost guaranteed not to. Of course the 0-4 and suddenly shorthanded Hawks found a way to miraculously bounce back and beat Davidson*, arguably the conference’s best team, 61-60 in their next game because, well, why not? That’s just the type of season we’re living through and we have to embrace all the chaos that it entails.
The bottom line for St. Joe’s is this: between the brutal losses and impactful injuries on one hand, and the recent gutsy win against a conference title-contender on the other, it’s impossible to project this team moving forward. All that can be said is their next game at Saint Louis will be a huge test for them and will tell us a lot about where they’re at as a unit. If they can pull one out for consecutive great wins, they’ll find themselves firmly back in the discussion. Conversely, if they get pushed around, we may have to think of the Davidson game as a complete and utter fluke.