Atlantic 10 Basketball power rankings: Dayton dominates, Rhode Island rallies

14. Saint Joseph’s Hawks

Record: 4-19 (0-10)

The Billy Lange rebuild season had a rough start that just kept getting uglier until where we are now. For what started with a promising win against UConn has now led into one of their worse seasons in team history, losing 18 of their last 20 since that win. Sure this rebuild looks promising with two 4-star recruits transferring in, but that doesn’t make up for this season’s team having one of the worst defenses in the country.

Giving up an average of 81.4 points per game which is one of three stats where they rank as one of the bottom-ten teams in the country in, where the other ones are the number of defensive turnovers produced and on the other side of the ball being overall field goal percentage. With stats like these, it’s no wonder why they are winless.

The lone bright spot this season for Saint Joseph’s has been junior guard Ryan Daly, who is carrying the team by leading the Hawks in points scored, assists, and rebounds per game with 20.1 points, 4.4 assists, and 7.6 rebounds per game. It is a shame that Daly is putting out these impressive stats only to get no wins in return for it, and it might stay that way for the rest of the season as the Hawks are only favored in one game to win and have a realistic chance of losing out This week they’ll have their work cut out for them if they want their first win as they will as they have Saint Bonaventure at home and URI away, two teams near the top of the standings.

13: Fordham Rams

Record: 7-15 (1-9)

Fordham has had some close losses to some quality teams in conference play this season. Matter of fact they have impressed with defense, only giving up 62.6 points per conference game which is first in the conference. The Rams, however, are at the bottom of the league because of their offense which averages 53 points per conference game, the lowest in the conference. In addition, they are the fourth lowest-scoring offense across the country, scoring just 58 points per game over this season so far.

These offensive woes have only gotten worse since their second-highest scorer and leading rebounder Chuba Ohams got a knee injury that sidelines him for the rest of the season early last month. This has left forward Onyi Eyisi to step up his role in the frontcourt and guards Ty Perry and Jalen Cobb to pick up on scoring as well as having one of the highest bench usage ratio in the nation at over 42%, but it has barely helped.

Since Ohams’ injury Fordham has scored more than 60 points only once, but this is where their defense comes to play as even with not that many points they can still provide a challenge as they have managed to draw out a few overtime games and even held Dayton to their lowest score all season. If Fordham can just improve the offense just a tiny bit, then they could turn themselves around as this defense is good enough to make a run at the conference tournament. Fordham has two tough opponents coming up this week as they have Davidson at Davidson and Duquesne at home.