5 Thoughts: Seton Hall survives upset bid, denies DePaul

Myles Powell battled his way to 24 points as Seton Hall survived upset bid from DePaul. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

By Jason Guerette (@JPGuerette)

NEWARK, N.J. — If you look up winning ugly in the dictionary, chances are good that this game Wednesday night in Newark will be listed there. Neither team shot the ball well, the Pirates missed a bunch of free throws, both teams turned the ball over, and there were some calls from the referees that had the crowd grumbling throughout.

And yet, 10th-ranked Seton Hall notched a 64-57 victory over the upset-minded DePaul Blue Demons, making the plays and shots they needed to make down the stretch.

Here are the five thoughts:

1. Ref Show 

Big East games tend to be hard to officiate as far as Division I college basketball games go. The league's DNA contains a physical, East Coast, hard-nosed, grinding style of hoops, and sometimes the whistles interrupt play more than most.

Tonight was one of those nights. The Pirates weren't playing well offensively, and the officials were calling some fouls that could be described as ticky-tack, and most of those ended up on the Pirates in the first half. There also were eventually four technical fouls, and 47 combined fouls called in the game, with 49 free throws being shot, and a cumulative game time of nearly two-and-a-half hours.

Both head coaches were very democratic about it after the game, but let's just say that the calls, and the reaction to those calls by the fans, and the reaction by the players to the calls, certainly played a big role in this game. I think the grumbling about the men in stripes would have been lessened a bit if not for the home team's...

2. Shooting Woes

No one shot the ball well tonight on either team. DePaul finished with 33 percent shooting, while the Pirates ended up at 39 percent after a hot start during which they vaulted out to a 17-6 early lead.

What really stood out tonight about the Pirates, however, was the free throw shooting. Seton Hall shot a very uncharacteristic 14-of-29 at the charity stripe tonight, and that's even with the Pirates making six of their last eight free throws overall. Until Myles Powell made a pair at the 5:09 mark of the second half, no Pirate had made two straight free throws all game long.

“It’s tough," head coach Kevin Willard said. "Free throws were kind of what got us in the first half. When you’re up six, up seven and you miss two front ends of the 1-and-1, it kind of takes some steam out of it a little bit, and that’s what I told the guys at halftime. I’m like, ‘We’re still playing pretty good, we’re just missing some free throws.’ I just think when (Myles Powell's) a career 88-percent free throw shooter goes 8-for-13, sometimes you have an off night.”  

Obviously, the Pirates are a better shooting team than this, ranking at just about the middle of the pack in the Big East at 71 percent coming in, so I'd chalk this up to an outlier and move on.

3. Coffee Is For Closers

... and Seton Hall has one in Powell. He was not immune from the team-wide shooting struggles tonight, making just seven of 21 field goal attempts, two of ten 3-pointers, and eight of 13 free throws on the night.

However, after turning the ball over on the break with the Pirates down by one and six minutes to play, the All-American would go on a personal 8-0 run, capping it with his second 3-pointer, and putting the Pirates ahead to stay. All told, Powell scored ten straight Seton Hall points down the stretch, and hit for 12 of his 24 points in the game's final seven minutes.

How was he able to pull through on a frustrating night? If you've been following along this year, you know what the answer was.

"This is probably one of the worst games I've had in a while," Powell said. "If it wasn't for my teammates and my coaching staff picking me up and not letting me hang my head, I don't think I would have finished like I did."

That turnover was a big turning point, as that was the point where Willard stepped in.

“I was just trying to encourage him," Seton Hall's skipper said. "He was struggling, and every once in a while, you don’t have your A-game, and I just wanted to tell him to keep on attacking. Sometimes the building’s loud, you just have to yell. One of the issues that we’re having is teams are doing a really good job, especially early in halves, early in the beginning of the game because everyone’s so fresh and locking in on him, and he’s expending a lot of energy early in games. That’s why I was having that nice conversation with him, to just kind of stay with it and don’t worry about it.”

4. Demon-ized

Maybe it's just recurring bad memories of a 30-point loss that this author witnessed at the tail end of the 2011-12 season at DePaul. Maybe it's the fact that the Pirates went on to drop four out of six to the Blue Demons between 2012 and 2016. 

But even though the Pirates responded to that streak by winning five in a row over DePaul from 2016-18, and have now won seven of their last nine against them, it never feels like Seton Hall plays exceptionally well against them. To wit, the last five meetings have been decided by eight points or fewer, and neither of the two games this year was decided until the closing minutes.

“I thought they did a really good job defensively on us," Willard said about the game tonight. "I think you have to give them a lot of credit, I thought they were very physical on the pick-and-rolls, they did a good job of keeping everything tight, but you’re not always going to able to score 80 points — especially in this league — so I thought it was a really good fight, a really good effort. I thought all the guys did what they had to do to find a way to win, and that’s really all that matters.”  

It seems the Blue Demons just present the Pirates with a tough matchup no matter what the statistics say coming in, and so the fact that they were able to beat them twice is a feather in their cap, all things considered.

5. $10 Steak

This win was the Pirates' 10th in a row, and they improved to 8-0 in Big East play, too. But they also extended their record to 25-0 with Fox Sports' Brian Custer on the call. It's the most-amazing streak that not a lot outside the Pirates' fan base knows about.

After the game, Custer tweeted that the fans behind him were nervous when the Blue Demons took a nine-point lead early in the second half, but he said that he'd seen bigger comebacks before, and added in his tweet that the Pirates were as tough as "a 10-dollar steak."

On a night where you shoot that poorly, you've got to be tough if you still want the victory, and for Seton Hall, their toughness leader has been Quincy McKnight. It was the senior point guard who spearheaded the charge. After the aforementioned Powell turnover, DePaul got out on the fast break. McKnight leaped up high in the air to break up an alley-oop pass, then deflected it off of a Blue Demon out of bounds to jump-start the Pirates' game-breaking run.

"I think everyone knows how good of a defender Q is," Willard said. "It was a huge play, because Charlie (Moore) picked Myles when he was about ready to pull a three, and then (they would have) had a dunk, which would have been huge. Q’s energy and his effort, and how hard he plays, he made a phenomenal play breaking it up, and then he slapped it off (Jalen) Coleman-Lands’ leg and we got the ball back, so it was a monster play.”  

McKnight ended up with a rebound, two steals, and an assist in the Pirates' late push, and finished with nine points, six assists, three rebounds and four steals overall. He put it in perspective after the game.

"We had a slow start, that's going to happen," McKnight said after the game. "The good thing about us is that if we're not scoring the ball, we're going to get stops (on defense). That's how we stay in the game when we're not scoring the ball. I think that it shows how tough we are."

Seton Hall will now go for an 11th-straight win Saturday morning, with an 11 a.m. tip time at the Rock against Xavier.