Canisius goes into last three of regular season hoping to find momentum entering MAAC tourney

Reggie Witherspoon has been frustrated with Canisius’ inconsistency, but believes Golden Griffins can carry momentum into MAAC tournament. (Photo by The Buffalo News)

This time of year, luck tends to play its way into conversations surrounding teams and their postseason chances, and with good reason.

As the calendar flips to March, good fortune is just as essential to success as wins and losses, with one bounce of the basketball making a bigger difference than any other factor. And while some schools have reaped the benefits of positive breaks, perhaps no team has been more snakebitten this season than Canisius.

At 4-13 in Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference play, the Golden Griffins are assured of playing in the opening round of the MAAC tournament one week from Tuesday in Atlantic City, but that does not necessarily mean the Griffs are a pushover. In fact, Canisius has competed in every game, with 10 of the 13 defeats coming within single digits. While that may be a hard pill to swallow, it comes with the added side of knowing the team has been able to play its way into victory if it executes fit a full 40 minutes.

“It’s frustrating, but we just try to look at these areas of the game and see where we can get better,” head coach Reggie Witherspoon reflected. “We knew that we weren’t going to be able to come in and just dominate teams every day. We’ve got to approach it like, ‘okay, we’ve gotta find a way to get better.’”

“What I told the team was we did some good things, but until we can learn from those good things and the things that we need to improve at, then you don’t accomplish anything. And if we can learn from them and get better, then we’ve made some headway.”

Canisius’ frontcourt, thought of as a potential strength this season, has been ravaged by health and injury concerns as of late, forcing Jacco Fritz and Malek Green to carry a larger share of the load than initially intended, along with freshman Xzavier Long. The three, with Scott Hitchon and Siem Uijtendaal unavailable Friday against Iona, were forced into greater playing time, but Witherspoon has seen the optimism behind that circumstance as a way to get his big men more seasoned heading into March.

“We have five bigs that we play, and it seems like of late, every day, someone’s sick or hurt,” he said. “Those two guys played a lot of minutes (Friday), probably more than normal, and gave us some really good minutes…Jacco with 12 points and 10 rebounds, he made some mistakes defensively, but 34 minutes is a lot. I don’t know that he’s played more than 34 minutes in a game this year.”

Three games remain for the Griffs before the MAAC tournament, a road trip to Quinnipiac on Sunday before closing the regular season at home later this week against Marist and Siena. And while time may have run out to move into the top half of the standings, the clock remains very much on Canisius’ side in terms of making a late run and potentially playing spoiler at Boardwalk Hall to an unsuspecting foe looking past the scrappy bunch from Buffalo. 

“We’ve got to get ourselves in a mindset of seeing where it is,” Witherspoon cautioned. “We’ve really got to play with a better purpose and consistency so that it doesn’t much matter where we’re playing. That’s got to be what we’ve got to get to, and that’s a hard place to get to. But we can, because most of these games have been really close games that we’ve had some really good minutes. In order for us to sustain a high quality of play, we’ve got to be more consistent.”