SMITHFIELD, R.I. – The magic carpet ride continues for the hottest team in the Northeast Conference. A Mount St. Mary’s team that few had going far this season, a season with a coaching change, is now in the NEC Tournament semifinals after a big 75-69 road victory at Bryant on Wednesday night, their eighth straight win. It’s a team that won by doing something they’ve had to do a lot of over the last year – hit the reset button.
There have been a lot of moments where this team has had to his the reset button and pull things together. There was the coaching change, for one, coming at the end of a long season. There were some rough games early on this season. There was the 1-4 start in NEC play. There have been many times where the defense has had to do it as they allow opponents to shoot an unseemly 51 percent from the field on the season. And on Wednesday night, there was the first half, where the Mountaineers shot 28 percent from the field and allowed the Bulldogs to shoot over 48 percent.
“Their crowd bothered us a little in the first half,” said head coach Jamion Christian. “Our guys, all the credit goes to our guys, they did an unbelievable job at halftime of really resetting and saying, let’s slow down, we’ve been a good basketball team all year, let’s execute. I think it was just resetting, as we’ve done many times all year, just allowed us to execute at the level we needed to tonight.”
The Mountaineers ran off seven unanswered points to tie the game at 39, then it was a back-and-forth game until they scored six unanswered to take the lead for good at 53-48. As the second half went on, you could sense they had the momentum. In many ways, that mirrored the season.
A big key was how they slowed down Bryant’s powerful offense, and it started with recently crowned NEC Rookie of the Year Shivaughn Wiggins. Inserted into the starting lineup early in conference play, Wiggins had a breakout game at Bryant in a tough overtime loss in January and never left the starting five. The box score says that he scored 16 points on 5-12 shooting and had one assist on Wednesday night. For a point guard, it’s a good, not great, stat line. But he got several big baskets and made life difficult for Bryant’s Frankie Dobbs, a cool hand at the point all season long for them.
“The thing about Shivaughn is he’s fearless,” said junior guard Julian Norfleet. “To go in there as a freshman, play in that type of crowd and play as he did, as composed as he did, is tremendous. Going into those situations, he takes on the opportunity head-on.”
The Mountaineers have been far from a stellar team defensively, but the potential is there. They showed some of it on Wednesday night.
Norfleet and Rashad Whack were great examples of the team’s perseverance as well on the evening. Neither shot the ball well for much of the night, as each went 5-15 from the field and they combined to go 5-18 from long range. Some of that came in the first half as they combined to go 2-11 and 1-7, but the ones they hit in the second half were at crucial junctures. They hit the reset button within the game to come up big.
Whack, who finished with a team-high 19 points, hit two to give the Mountaineers leads before the under-12 media timeout. Norfleet gave them the lead for good with just over eight minutes left, Whack added another over a minute later to stretch the lead to six, then Norfleet hit a dagger with five minutes left to put them up by seven.
They were well on their way at that point.
Raven Barber won’t make a lot of headlines for his numbers, including on Wednesday night. He had 14 points and six rebounds, though his 8-8 showing at the free throw line was huge. But he set a tone with this team when things turned around on the season, and the team has rallied around it. Christian said Barber asked what he could do to get this team to the NCAA Tournament in his last go-round. That got things going before long.
“Raven’s a great person,” said Whack. “He does things that a lot of people don’t see off the court, but he’s a great guy. He’s a senior, he wants a lot for this team, and like Coach said, he’s unselfish and wants the best for us. As his friends and a teammate, we owe it to him as his last year to go out there and give it our all.”
Mount St. Mary’s has gone through quite a bit in the last calendar year or so. There is every reason to believe that better times are ahead and perhaps less of a need to hit the reset button. After Wednesday night, there is more reason to believe the better times might be in the very near future.
