Return to Iona basketball sparks Gaels in win over Marist

Rickey McGill's 16 points and seven assists led Iona past Marist on a night where six Gaels scored 10 or more points. (Photo by The Journal News)

NEW ROCHELLE, NY -- A disastrous non-conference season in which Iona lost nine of its first eleven games served merely as motivational fuel for what lied ahead.

Now five skirmishes into the portion of the year that matters most, the Gaels' program seems to not only be finding itself again, but performing better than ever when hardly anyone imagined such an effort would be possible, especially after conceding ten three-point field goals before halftime in its most recent showing.

Such was the case Friday night, when after allowing Marist to hang with its three-time defending Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship-winning outfit, Iona did what it does best, sharing the basketball and spreading the love equally among its more-than-capable hands, downing the Red Foxes by the final score of 90-77 at the Hynes Athletics Center.

"We came out a little sluggish," Rickey McGill admitted as the Gaels (6-10, 4-1 MAAC) watched six of their own post double-figure scoring totals -- led by 21 points off the bench from Asante Gist -- in the same game for the first time since January 27, 2018, when Iona defeated Manhattan to conclude last year's Nassau Coliseum tripleheader. "Then we had to just pick it up in the second half. We started sharing the ball more, and we started finding the open players to get them open shots."

For the majority of the first half Friday, it was as though Marist (6-11, 1-4 MAAC) was beating Iona at its own game, relying on timely shooting created by open looks to drain seven of its first nine shots from behind the line and giving the illusion that a normally methodical Red Foxes offense was running with the Gaels. However, as head coach John Dunne put it, the outburst -- fueled largely by Ryan Funk's team-best 21 points, all from long distance -- was simply the product of being in the right place at the right time.

"Our whole thing has always been, honestly, when we have good looks, we want to let the ball fly," he said of Marist's torrid beginning. "When Funk gets going like that, you've got to ride that hot hand, but I don't think we were running, I think we were just shooting a little quicker than maybe some of my teams in the past."

Marist could not sustain its marksmanship after the intermission, missing 11 of its 15 second-half attempts from deep and falling victim to Iona's transition game, which gradually fed off the Red Foxes' cold spell to outhustle and eventually outscore the visitors, something Dunne lamented when offering an explanation for what went wrong.

"Listen, at the end of the day, we're not trying to beat Iona 94-90," he said, placing an emphasis on limiting the Gaels' proficient offense. "We have to do a better job on the defensive end."

Speaking of Iona's firepower, the Gaels are now averaging 93 points per game in MAAC play, the program's best start over the first five league games in any season under head coach Tim Cluess' tenure. With major uncertainty surrounding the program following the latest retooling of the roster in the offseason, coupled with the dismissal of Roland Griffin in late October, hardly anyone could have expected such a potent attack from Iona, and the travails of spending all of December on the road have given way to a strong team chemistry that has fused itself in a similar vein to some of this incarnation's trophy-earning predecessors.

"It's night and day compared to where we were," Cluess reflected on his team's start to the season and what it may have ultimately forged. "I think that long trip, as horrific as it was record-wise, was great for bringing these guys together. They went through their battles at times with each other, and I think they came out of that saying, 'if we don't come together, this is going to be a really, really, really, miserable, long year. I see their camaraderie on the court, I see it in the locker room, I see it in practice every day. So I've really seen them grow together, and just watching the flow of the game -- if you've watched it at all -- we're playing more like a team that's been together a little bit now than what we were earlier."

"Now I feel like we're playing Iona basketball," McGill added, proclaiming a return to the Gaels' familiar roots. "I feel like we're sharing the ball, getting open looks, so as of now, we're playing good team basketball."