Siena still searching for complete game and consistent answers after blowing lead to Georgetown

Despite Siena’s two high-major wins in November, Carmen Maciariello remains vocal about need for Saints to improve. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A harsh reality of basketball is a team learning to put together a full game to take advantage of an opportunity. More often than not, the vagaries of life as a group finding its way yield more to lament than to celebrate.

Siena found that out the hard way Wednesday against a much-maligned Georgetown team still looking to right its own ship after several head-scratching losses in November. Searching for their third win over a Power 6 opponent after taking down Florida State and Seton Hall in the ESPN Events Invitational in Orlando, the Saints held a six-point lead with under 11 minutes remaining, yet could not close the deal after falling victim to a 12-0 Georgetown run that sealed their fate in a 75-68 loss to the Hoyas that Carmen Maciariello took to heart, and rightfully so considering the effort his team put forth for the first 29 minutes.

“Disgusting effort, a game I thought we let slip away,” Siena's head coach remarked, not mincing words to mask his chagrin at what had transpired. “A missed opportunity, too many straight-line drives letting their best players get off, we lose the rebounding battle by 10 in the second half. For me, I’m not really pleased. Up six, you give up a 12-0 run. For a team that wants to win championships in that locker room, I gotta see a lot more.”

“I told them at halftime we should have been up eight to ten points, so for me, credit to Georgetown. They won the game, they made the knockout punch, and we didn’t match their physicality. We let them get second chance opportunities, we let them get to the rim, and then they scored off our miscues and lack of good shot selection or not taking the right shot.”

Some of the shooting woes for a Siena team that shot 35 percent from the field in a loss that dropped the Saints to 5-4 fell within the backcourt, where Javian McCollum struggled to a 4-for-14 night while Jared Billups and freshman Michael Eley were 1-for-7 and 1-for-10, respectively. That lack of marksmanship, coupled with a 25-15 rebounding deficit in the second half, proved to be the deciding factors.

“I thought that was the game,” a blunt Maciariello assessed. “We didn’t convert opportunities when we did have offensive rebounds. I don’t care about stats, I don’t care if you’re 0-for-a million. When you get your feet set and that ball comes to you, you’ve got to have the confidence to shoot it.”

“It’s a lack of effort and a lack of focus on our part,” Jackson Stormo opined, even in the wake of a 21-point, 7-rebound showing that was far and away the best of anyone wearing the Siena gold Wednesday. “We’ve got to continue, when we are on a run like that, rebounding the ball well. We can’t relax.”

The relaxing to which Stormo alluded occurred at the beginning of the Hoyas’ tide-turning stretch, when after a Primo Spears jumper cut the Siena lead to four, Billups was called for a loose ball foul guarding big man Qudus Wahab, sending possession back to Georgetown, who promptly connected on a Brandon Murray 3-pointer. Murray drained another triple on the ensuing possession following a McCollum miss, and the hosts would not trail for the remainder of the evening.

“I thought that was a huge run, big momentum swing,” Maciariello said of Georgetown's five-point possession. “Murray had that baseline out-of-bounds three that we fell asleep on. You can’t do it. You’ve got to be locked in and focused. It’s great, you can say you’ve played 36 minutes or 32 minutes, but you’ve got to play 40 minutes and you can’t have those mental lapses, whether it’s guarding or fouling or not blocking out. Those are details. That’s where the success lies.”

“I feel like I say this every game we play, no matter wins or losses,” Andrew Platek added with regard to the Saints’ inability to play a complete game. “I can’t really put my finger on one thing, it’s the multiple little things over the course of a game that add up. Every possession matters, so if you’re playing five minutes or 15 minutes, what you do is going to affect the outcome of the game. Look at the run that beat us. It was a silly loose ball foul, then we were falling asleep, and then we didn’t pick up in transition. That’s three plays that we wish we had back, and it probably would have been a different game.”

Still, Siena is over .500 with three more non-conference games remaining before Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference play resumes at the end of the month, and the high-major wins over the Thanksgiving weekend will certainly bolster the Saints’ resume moving forward. However, for a group that entered the season with high hopes and touted its collective unity in an offseason trip to Italy that still looks as though it has expedited the growth of a roster with such vast turnover, the struggles with bottling up the same intensity from the opening tip to the final buzzer continue to stunt the overall development. 

“I would say still inconsistent,” Maciariello admitted when asked to gauge his roster’s overall efforts to date. “I do think they understand how hard they have to play, now if we can do it for 40 minutes, that’s when you have success. If you do the details, play hard for 40 minutes and do all the little things, the score’s going to take care of itself. I’m not worried about the score if we’re playing that hard and we can do it and sustain it. Now it’s about everybody playing that hard when they come in, not worrying about their minutes, not worrying about their stats, not worrying about anything that’s on the outside. All that stuff is garbage to me. You’ve got to come and do the job, and you’ve got to do it every day in practice and you’ve got to do it on the court when the lights are on. If you can do that, we’ll be a good team, or we’ll be inconsistent if we show up for spurts.”

“We still haven’t played a full two halves of basketball where we’re at our best,” Platek reiterated. “We’ve got to shore up these mistakes, and it starts with me and Jackson leading these guys and setting the right example. We take responsibility for this and we’re going to learn from it, and get better for Delaware.”