Monmouth’s long, hard road leading to potential payoff in CAA tournament

King Rice and Monmouth have survived non-conference gauntlet and gone on timely surge late in CAA season, moving into top half of conference standings with shot at Top 4 finish and double bye in tournament. (Photo by Matteo Bracco/Hofstra Athletics)

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — King Rice apologized profusely throughout the season, and still continues to do so, with regard to the arduous non-conference schedule he set up for his Monmouth team this season.

Balancing the need to field a competitive team and test it before league play with the realities of having to fund a mid-major program, Rice took the Hawks on the road for nearly all of the season’s first two months. A non-conference slate with only one home game was bookended by trips to a pair of Final Four contenders in Michigan State and Auburn, yielding a 2-11 record that the veteran head coach defended by selling the potential of his roster toward the end of the year.

Almost two months after taking on Bruce Pearl and the top-ranked Tigers, Monmouth has made headway in a crowded Coastal Athletic Association. Winners of five of their last seven after a come-from-behind win at Hofstra Thursday, the Hawks are 8-7 in CAA play with three games remaining in a regular season that now finds the team tied for sixth in the conference standings and in striking distance of an all-important double bye in the CAA tournament, given to each of the league’s top four finishers.

“All year, I kept saying I overscheduled,” Rice reiterated. “I kind of put us in a bad spot, but we did make a lot of money. It worked in some ways, but I kept saying we had a good team. To win five of seven tells you we can play, too. I think our league this year is more competitive than any other time we’ve been in it. Anybody can win it, so I think we’re one of the teams that can get on a roll. If there’s any way we can move up and get a double bye, that changes the whole thing for us.”

Another X-factor for Monmouth is its ability to get its supporting cast involved. Although not as deep as some of the teams in the Hawks’ heyday several years ago, this unit has multiple complementary pieces that can step up if leading scorer Abdi Bashir struggles. Rice needed his role players to raise their game Thursday as Bashir battled inefficiency, and got it in the form of point guard Madison Durr and Andrew Ball, a Swiss Army knife of sorts who scored seven straight points in the final minute to steal victory from the jaws of defeat against a desperate Hofstra team.

“I’ve been saying he’s one of my most talented kids,” Rice said of Ball, who demonstrated his value last summer on the Hawks’ trip to Italy. “He’s just a kid that’s so talented, but he doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence, and I’m trying to build it. When he made the four free throws, I was happy for him. The three-ball going in, as soon as he let it go, I was like, ‘that’s game,’ because I’ve watched this kid make them so much.”

“What Abdi has done has been amazing. Last year, he played behind (Xander Rice) and he was what, eight, nine, ten minutes (per game)? For him to explode like this is incredible for all of us, but we have other guys that are good. Jack Collins guarding their kid, Andrew Ball got going, my team played the right way. They stayed together and we were fortunate to get a win over here and really steal one from Hofstra.”

And in Durr, a point guard whose strength is attacking the lane and drawing fouls—he incited 11 whistles in Thursday’s win—a physical transformation in the offseason has given way to a more cerebral guard who is able to channel his brute strength more productively on the offensive end.

“His improvements came this summer,” Rice said. “He’s lost about 20 pounds from when he came on campus, he couldn’t move how he’s moving now. Carrying that other weight, him running into someone, it would have been a charge all the time because he was just too big. But he took our criticism and went home and changed his body over the summer. He just lets you coach him, even when I go off on him, he lets you coach him and then he implements what you’re telling him. So I’m the fortunate one that gets to coach him.”

Rice has had his battles with Hofstra over the years, going back to when the series with the Pride was a non-conference affair. More often than not, they ended in decisive victories at Monmouth’s expense, and it looked like Thursday would trend similarly when the Hawks found themselves down by a 36-20 margin late in the first half. But to his credit, Rice was able to settle his group down, taking advantage of a timely Hofstra cold spell to score seven straight points going into halftime, turning a deficit that looked insurmountable into a single-digit affair that seemed much more manageable inside the locker room.

“I think that was the key to the game,” Rice said of the half-concluding run. “We talked about it before. We’ve been over here a bunch of times, and every time we come over here, it seems like we’re down 20 before we even lift our heads up. (Hofstra) came out hitting. First shot, throws it out, kid hits it. I’m like, ‘here we go again.’ But I told my kids, when that happens, keep your cool. Let’s see if we can out-team them today. And I think that happened at the end of the half. We’ve shown this year that when we get down, we can hang our heads, and then it’s bad for all of us.”

Monmouth only led for 22 seconds Thursday, but they were the 22 seconds that mattered most. And as the calendar ramps up heading into March, the Hawks have emerged from a beginning of the season that may have felt endless, surviving and now picking up steam at an opportune time going into a wide-open tournament where picking a winner may be better achieved by firing darts blindfolded.

“We’ve got a chance this year,” Rice said, projecting his trademark quiet confidence. “I like where we’re at right now because we’ve got two at home. These guys have been trusting me. They trusted me with the non-conference when it wasn’t looking good, and now they’re trusting me through this. That’s why we have a chance and we can beat anybody.”