Manhattan’s Swish Gilyard (10) hit go-ahead basket for Jaspers on Friday to down Merrimack, the fourth win in last five games for John Gallagher’s team. (Photo by Vincent Dusovic/Manhattan Athletics)
NEW YORK — For John Gallagher, Friday was—to steal a line from Ice Cube, who the Manhattan coach actually quoted in his postgame press conference—a good day.
It began with Gallagher’s beloved Philadelphia Eagles commemorating their Super Bowl LIX victory with a parade through the City of Brotherly Love. The coach was unable to enjoy it in person, although his four children attended with several other family members, because he had other business to tend to Friday. The circumstances keeping him away? The Jaspers hosted MAAC leader Merrimack in a game that had significant conference implications.
For most of the night, it looked as though the visiting Warriors would further their grip on the top of the standings, leading by 11 points with seven minutes remaining in regulation. But a change in tactics on the part of Gallagher sparked a run for Manhattan, who stifled Merrimack with a taste of its own medicine to walk off the Draddy Gymnasium floor with a 79-75 win, holding its opposition to just eight points down the stretch.
“The tide turned when (Gallagher) did go zone,” Merrimack head coach Joe Gallo remarked. “It wasn’t as much our misses. Our transition defense was not very good. We took some long threes that led to long rebounds and points for them.”
“Jeff Van Gundy said, sometimes it’s just a make-miss game. Devon Savage and Matt Becht got some really, really good looks when (Manhattan) went to that zone and it could have put the game away, but we missed some free throws and we missed some threes down the stretch.”
Becht and Savage, the Warriors’ top two supporting options behind leading scorer and MAAC Player of the Year favorite Budd Clark, were a combined 7-for-25 from the floor Friday. And after battling Merrimack to the wire in the first meeting between the two teams in January, the Jaspers were better prepared to go over the top to beat one of the more unorthodox—yet suffocating—defenses in college basketball.
“You can’t shoot threes against this zone,” Gallagher commented. “We shot 48 twos, we shot 13 threes. I’m just saying this off the cuff, that might be the lowest total of threes that a John Gallagher team has ever shot. Everything we run had to be about elbows and baseline.”
As for the defense? In Gallagher’s own words, it was literally an audible that he admittedly was saving for later in the season, but the switch to a mirror image against Merrimack proved to be the deciding factor.
“We really, on the fly, have been working on it,” he said of playing zone. “Our 22 call, which is our 2-2-1 back to 2-3, I think that slowed them down. We got six or seven consecutive stops, and that sort of shifted the game. When we got stops, we really ran good half-court offense.”
“Maybe we should have done it earlier. We’re gonna have to play different defenses, but we’ve been working on all different types of zones, so we just went with it, and you saw—I even thought our slides were excellent in it—they really, really bought into it. We threw it out there and they executed, so they deserve the credit.”
With the win, Manhattan is back over .500 in MAAC play at 7-6, looking to avenge a loss to Fairfield when it visits the Stags on Sunday. Merrimack, now tied for the conference lead with Quinnipiac but on the wrong side of the tiebreaker, hosts Marist in a matchup Gallo said would be a test where the the team that resists blinking would likely prevail. With six games to play in the regular season, the Warriors have experienced their current perch in the Northeast Conference, so the waters in which they presently swim have not fazed them just yet.
“I don’t think these guys are looking too far ahead,”
Gallo intimated. “The end is near, but it’s not that near. There’s a lot of basketball to be played. We’ve been through every scenario all year now. It’s a really mature group, older kids who know how to win, so it’ll just make them a little bit hungrier coming down the stretch here, a little bit of a reset.”
On the other side of the coin, Manhattan seems to be taking shape having won four of its last five and rounding into a form that its leader grew accustomed to overseeing at his previous stop.
“What you’re seeing is in February, we just feel like we’re pitching good,” Gallagher proclaimed. “We made plays, and (Merrimack was) gonna have to make two or three more plays to beat us. That felt, to me, like the last five years at Hartford. It feels like we’re there. I think it makes us a team, come March, we’re a team that in certain ways, is fun to coach because the scoreboard doesn’t matter. When we get stops, it really energizes our offense. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to win.”
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