His Hofstra team having won 11 straight games to end regular season, Speedy Claxton has Pride peaking at right time entering CAA tournament. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)
The second-year head coach of his alma mater, Claxton is not normally one for an overflow of emotion, preferring to live within the moment and not get too far ahead of himself or the young men he is tasked with leading. That said, the former Jay Wright point guard and NBA champion who now occupies the same chair his college coach once did allowed himself to bask momentarily in what he and his roster had just accomplished Saturday, if only for a minute.
“All you guys know this is more than a job to me,”
Claxton said with more than just a tinge of heartfelt appreciation after Hofstra clinched a share of the Colonial Athletic Association regular season championship and No. 1 seed in the upcoming CAA tournament. “To come back and be able to win this thing as a coach, the words really can’t say anything about it. This is one championship down, and honestly, this championship is a lot harder to win than the tournament.”
“To come out as champions, we had a long journey. This thing started back in June, and I told these guys on day one: We have a championship team.”
Suddenly, the reflection halted, replaced by the laser-like focus that has become the most uniting force behind Hofstra’s 11-game win streak that has vaulted the Pride into its current position.
“They proved me right,” Claxton said, “but it’s not over. We have another one that we’re going for.”
Hofstra, for the third time in five seasons and fourth in the last eight years, has claimed a piece of CAA hardware in the hopes that it will finally lead to something more. The Pride entered the postseason as the top seed in 2016 and 2019 the same way it will one week from today in Washington, D.C., only to come away empty-handed both times and have to settle for trips to the NIT. And in 2020, Hofstra did cut down the nets for the first time since leaving the America East Conference in 2001, but was unable to reap the rewards of its labor once COVID claimed the NCAA Tournament among its tidal wave of destruction. With that said, the sense of reaching the precipice and coming so far has penetrated the locker room, and is already serving as a motivator.
“I think this fuels us in the right way,” senior forward Warren Williams said. “It’s going to help us focus even more because we got a taste of victory and we just want to keep it going.”
“I think it’s definitely going to make us more focused,” Tyler Thomas added. We’ve got a great group of guys who like to work hard and there’s still some things to fix out there, so we’re not satisfied.”
The insatiable appetite with which Hofstra has motored through CAA play is recognized in the convincing nature of the majority of its victories. Only three of the Pride’s 16 league wins were decided by less than 13 points, and seven of them came by 20 or more markers. The turning point may have come as early as December 31, when North Carolina A&T’s tip-in at the buzzer erased a 13-point Hofstra lead and handed the Pride its only defeat on its home floor.
“I’m not saying that was a bad loss, but that opened our eyes,” Claxton admitted. “We know that you can’t let any opponent back in the game when you have a big lead like that.”
“I think we’re just very focused,” Thomas reiterated, drilling down on the precision. “We know that every team’s coming in to try to knock us off, and we kind of take pride in throwing the first punches, keep throwing punches and don’t let them back into the game.”
“We love when they call the first timeout,” Claxton interrupted, breaking into a wide grin. That fuels us.”
Having been on this stage as a player, Claxton — whose own Hofstra team went 16-2 in the America East on the way to the NCAA Tournament in 2000 — knows the magnitude of what his team was able to achieve. He conceded his roster may not, but the lack of knowledge has been compensated by the approach to business over the past month as the Pride looks to reclaim what, in some ways, was snatched away by circumstances beyond its control.
“They just go out there and hoop, man,” Claxton said with an effervescent smile. “I’m proud of them. To go 16-2 is unbelievable, and it’s extremely hard because you really have to come out and play hard, play the right way night in and night out. You can’t have any off nights, and I’m just extremely proud of these guys, man. That’s hard to do, to go 16-2. This is a really good conference.”
“Right after we beat Charleston and Towson, we were in the locker room and I told these guys, ‘listen, we’re in the driver’s seat. If Charleston messes up and loses one game, it’s our league.’ And to these kids’ credit, there was no looking back. Fortunately for us, Charleston lost to Drexel that night and we were full steam ahead. We took it game by game, but there was no letup. We knew what was at stake and we had tunnel vision.”
The same mindset exists now with one hurdle cleared and the second — three games on consecutive nights in March — still to come. But much like the championship teams of Hofstra’s past, the common thread here is the common bond and common denominator of a group that cares for nothing else besides emerging from the heat of battle victorious.
“I think we’ve got a special group of guys,” Thomas said. “It’s really like a family unit. I’ve never been a part of a team that’s like, so close. A lot of teams say family, but I think we mean it. We always have each other’s back, no one’s out there being selfish. We just want to hoop, we just want to win.”
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