They have exactly zero three-game winning streaks this season – one fewer than they’ll need to win the MAAC tournament, which begins Friday in Buffalo, N.Y.
They have somehow managed to return all but one player from last year’s 19-11 squad, add their two best players, both of whom missed the entire second half of the season last year, and still finish play .500 for the entire regular season.
They went 0-4 on a recent home stand that could have put them in first place.
Is it possible to ask, “so what?”
The Stags’ men’s basketball team thinks so. After all, as junior guard Terrance Todd pointed out after last Monday’s 84-78 loss to St. Peter’s, “the tournament is a completely different season. Anything can happen.”
Todd’s comments came after a crushing loss that capped off the aforementioned home stand, and made it possible for the Stags to finish as low as seventh in the conference standings.
A much needed 70-65 win last Thursday at Iona put them back in the driver’s seat, and the biggest Harbor Yard crowd in two years – a senior night draw of nearly 4,000 – saw the Stags out-play a gritty Loyola team to clinch the third seed in the tournament for the second straight year. Last year, sixth-seeded Siena ended the Stags season in the quarterfinals.
“We have the tools,” said forward DeWitt Maxwell ’06, trying, as his teammates have been doing now for weeks, to put a finger on how in the world a team this good on paper is 14-14 in the standings.
“We’ve got T-Todd, Goode, Gai, we’ve got all the pieces. It’s just a matter of putting them together,” he said.
If they can put them together, and win three in a row in what appears to be a wide open tournament, they’ll make it back to the Big Dance for the fist time since the 1996-97 season, when, as a 16 seed, they took top-ranked North Carolina down to the wire in a hotly-contested 84-76 loss.
The road to basketball’s promised land begins Saturday at 9:30 p.m. against the winner of Friday’s Loyola-Manhattan game. The Stags split the season series with the Jaspers, who denied them the league crown with a 69-54 win in the 2003 title game and swept the Greyhounds, who had six times the wins they had last year, when they only won one game. The Greyhounds though, are a much improved team, and have wins over Manhattan and top-seeded Niagara.
“Guys are pretty excited,” said Michael Bell ’06. “We talked about getting some momentum, coming out to win. Come tournament time, that’s all that matters.”
Coach Tim O’Toole, who has been everything from ecstatic to irate on this roller-coaster ride of a season, summed it up this way: “We’ve had our share of ups and downs, but we’re excited. We showed some grit [down the stretch] and finished it properly.”
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