NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — A season ago, Anthony Latina led the Sacred Heart Pioneers to a 10-10 record in their first year in the MAAC. There are many ways to get to that mark, and for the Pios, it was pairing the conference’s second-best offense with its fourth-worst defense. At Sacred Heart’s pace, it led to some really fun basketball games, like the 99-90 shootout loss to Quinnipiac and the 90-88 loss to Iona.
Six games into the 2025-26 season, the Pioneers seem to be cut from the same cloth. Sacred Heart is going to play some fun games, but at the end of the day, it has to be better on the defensive end to pull those games out. Anybody who tuned into Monday night’s matchup with Central Connecticut in New Britain left thinking it was a well-played, competitive and exhilarating, but the Pioneers came out on the losing end, 108-106 in overtime. It drops Sacred Heart to 2-4, and drops the team’s defense to 348th on KenPom.
The Pioneers have impressive offensive spurts, where just about anybody on the roster can come into the game and quickly erase a deficit or extend a lead. Central took an 11-point lead in the second half with the Pios beginning to wilt away, but they stormed back, cutting the lead down to one to stay in the game.
Eventually, Sacred Heart built up a five-point lead with less than three minutes left, and even led by three in the final 30 seconds. But Jay Rodgers found himself wide open on the right wing to tie the game with nine seconds left in regulation.
“We gotta find a way to get some stops,” Latina said. “We couldn’t stop them. When we needed key stops, we couldn’t get them.”
Latina says Sacred Heart generally tries to foul up three with under 10 seconds, but because Rodgers got the shot off with about that much time remaining, it didn’t give them the time to foul. Additionally, he considered that the Pioneers were still in the one-and-one, and that playing the foul game too early could put his team in a position to lose.
The final play of overtime also highlighted Sacred Heart’s poor defense. Blue Devil big man Max Frazier slipped a screen and dove toward the empty lane for a poster dunk with 2.1 seconds to go, giving Central the lead.
Frazier combined with Rodgers to wreak havoc on the Pioneers’ defense, with passes over the top in transition and the pick-and-roll game decimating Sacred Heart’s interior coverage.
“They’re good at that,” Latina said. “Rodgers is a veteran guy. We were obviously switching, and one thing with Frazier is he’s quick and fast, and he’s long. So if he gets even a half step on you and gets behind you. We had to make a better adjustment.”
Rodgers had success with that pass against Rutgers and throughout the season, something CCSU coach Patrick Sellers attributes to the way he manipulates defenses with his eyes. Regardless, it’s an area where Sacred Heart needs to be more disciplined, as it gave up plenty of easy baskets.
Central Connecticut shot 67% from inside the arc, which isn’t even far off from Sacred Heart’s season-long 2-point defense at 63.2%, ranking 351st out of 365 Division-I teams. For everything that Anquan Hill gives the Pioneers offensively – and he scored 34 points on Monday – he does not give them a terrific rim protector. He allows Sacred Heart to switch and defend with versatility, but teams can pull Pioneer defenders out of the lane too often, creating positive spacing for threes and twos.
“We’ve gotta be a little more connected,” Latina said. “We gotta be a little more physical without fouling. We tried to start getting more physical, but we just kept fouling.”
For Latina, connectivity starts with communication and practice.
“Right now, we have average communication,” he said. “We have to have elite communication. A game like that when they are feeling it, you’re gonna come up on the short end of the stick a little bit too often. So we got to practice it better.”
But despite all of the defensive flaws, Sacred Heart still went on the road and had a chance to win a game against a good opponent. Yann Farell scored a season-high 20 points. Dashon Gittens had his fifth consecutive double-digit scoring game with 22. Nyle Ralph-Beyer came back from injury – and off of one practice – made two threes and scored eight points.
The Pioneers will overwhelm some teams with pace and offense, and it really depends more on the day than the matchup sometimes. Just like last season’s MAAC Tournament play-in game when SHU took an 11-2 lead before Fairfield could even blink.
“It shows that we can score,” Latina said. “They’re very good defensively, it was our type of game, and they beat us at our own game. But we showed that we have some guys that can really put the ball in the basket.”
