Friday, December 22, 2017

Carrington's latest resurgence coming at right time as Pirates prepare for Big East play

Khadeen Carrington has bounced back from two of his worst games this season with tour de force performances for Seton Hall, who closes non-conference play Saturday against Manhattan. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

Before Seton Hall tipped off a season in which the expectation was a legacy-defining coda for its senior class, head coach Kevin Willard was already praising the transition of Khadeen Carrington into the Pirates' point guard, a role filled by a new face for the third time in as many years after Isaiah Whitehead departed for the NBA and Madison Jones graduated.

The road to playing on the ball as opposed to off of it has not been completely smooth, but the Brooklyn native has managed to quickly put any struggle to rest through Seton Hall's non-conference season, following up a lackluster effort with a more definitive and dominant showing that has fallen in line with the majority of his body of work over three-plus seasons.

"If you want to be a great player, you can't dwell on bad games," Carrington remarked after his 26-point night Wednesday led the Pirates to an 89-68 rout of Wagner just four days removed from an uncharacteristic 4-for-17 performance on the road at Rutgers last Saturday. "That's what I've tried to do. I've tried to put that behind me and just move on to the next one."

"I know how long the season is," he added, underscoring the need to not let one game get the better of him. "That's what I try to tell these guys. We took a bad loss on Saturday, but you can't dwell on that. You've just gotta bounce back and move on to the next one."

Carrington has managed to do exactly that on two separate occasions already this season, the first coming at the end of November; when his one-point game against Vanderbilt was quickly erased with a more typical 16 points in Seton Hall's takedown of Texas Tech at Madison Square Garden, and this week against Wagner, the latter of which earned plaudits from his coach for his renewed focus.

"The tough thing about Saturday night was he took good shots," Willard said of Carrington's day against Rutgers. "The big thing for him was I wanted him to be a leader. I thought he came to practice very aggressive, he came to practice very focused. I thought that rubbed off on everybody, and I thought his mindset led him to this game."

"It was very important to me," Carrington echoed of his need to regroup. "I was down on myself for a little bit, especially because of the way I was shooting prior to this game. But I just stayed in the gym, worked on a lot this week with Coach, just getting shots up."

As the Pirates' floor general marches his way through inconsistent patches, he does so with the total confidence of his coach, which has gradually manifested itself into the vision Willard had for his team all along.

"He changes the game in a way no one else can," Willard said last month following Seton Hall's win over Vanderbilt. "He just has to get used to having the amount of attention he's getting. He's going through the same thing Isaiah went through his sophomore year, the exact same thing. He's going through the same progressions, the same struggles. Like I said at the beginning of the year, I have total confidence in him playing and running the show."

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