PHILADELPHIA – Merrimack hadn’t held an opponent under a point per possession through its first eight games of the season. That had never happened in the six previous seasons of the Warriors’ Division-I history.
Following back-to-back losses to Penn and Hofstra to open up the Cathedral Classic at the Palestra, Joe Gallo’s team was beginning to look like a group that would need to rely on its offense to win them games. That’s not what this program has been. It’s not what Gallo wants this program to be.
“We won a Northeast 10 Final like 42-39 10 years ago,” Gallo said. “We’ve gotta get more comfortable in these rock-fight type of games.”
The first half of Sunday’s “getaway day” matchup with La Salle didn’t look like a rock fight at first. The Explorers made 11 of their first 15 field goal attempts, and Merrimack scored 42 points in the opening frame to take a six point lead into the break. But it was on the back of high-level shooting from Ernest Shelton and Tye Dorset. Then, it flipped. When the shooting didn’t hold in the second half, Merrimack played its most Merrimack half of the season.
The Warriors slowed the pace down, won the turnover battle, and kept forcing bad shots from La Salle. Each team scored just 24 points in the final 20 minutes, and the Warriors closed out a 66-60 win to salvage one from the weekend.
Darris Nichols’ team struggled with a zone against Penn down the stretch on Saturday, but shredded Merrimack early on. The Explorers’ boss thinks that changed when the Warriors starting turning them over.
“You got 19 turnovers,” Nichols said. “And then you start getting spooked. Guys just not making the right passes, completing the right passes.”
He’s right about players getting spooked out and just making the wrong decisions. Anybody who watches Merrimack knows how often they get a ball thrown directly to one of their players in the zone. But that’s not why the Warriors won the game.
After five straight stops helped Merrimack push the lead out from two to six, the Warriors put Naas Hart on the foul line, and he made one of two free throws. Far too often, Gallo has seen this year’s Warriors team struggle to bounce back after a string of stops ends. Not today.
“If we get three stops in a row seven or more times, we win 90% of our games, and we’ve done it a bunch,” Gallo said. “But the problem is that we had about six ‘reverse turkeys,‘ where teams score three times in a row. It’s been all feast or famine. I thought we did a good job of bouncing back.”
Merrimack followed it up with five more stops in a row. KC Ugwuakazi was the defensive key.
The East Texas A&M transfer has played just 37% of the Warriors’ minutes, but played his best game in a Merrimack uniform on Sunday, blocking five shots at the back of the zone. In the final string of stops, he swatted a Noah Collier shot in the lane, and then on the next possession, blocked an Ashton Walker corner three.
“I’ve been telling myself I’ve gotta play him more,” Gallo said. “I just gotta find him minutes because he makes a difference defensively. I don’t know who I thought I was trying to be an offensive guy.”
The final minutes of a game for Merrimack last season were Budd Clark time. On Sunday, freshman point guard Kevair Kennedy got his first real chance to close out a game with the lead, and he delivered.
Kennedy scored eight of Merrimack’s last 10 points in the last nine minutes, and even grabbed a few steals to end La Salle possessions before the Explorers even had a chance to get a shot up.
“He’s gonna grow into that Budd Clark role, that Juvaris Hayes role, that Javon Bennett role,” Gallo said. “Where we can just take the air out of the clock a little bit and have them go make a play.”
With the first two games of MAAC play looming – the Warriors take on Rider and Fairfield at home this weekend before the final non-conference stretch – this was an important one for Merrimack to have.
“The new guys have adjusted to the basketball just fine,” Gallo said. “But you don’t want residual effects of playing a tough schedule, where all the sudden you lose this game and you’re sitting on your phone (on the bus) for seven hours texting people ‘man, are we going to win?’”
If Merrimack plays as well as it knows it can and should defensively, 66 points is more than enough to win MAAC games. 10 threes are more than enough to win MAAC games. The Warriors went 11-3 when scoring at least 66 in MAAC games last year. But there may be a little more variability with the zone than we’re used to seeing.
It’s up to this group to solve that between now and March.
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