Seton Hall stunk last season. If you’re a Rutgers basketball fan looking for a glimmer of hope right now after the Pirates ran your team off the floor in embarrassing fashion on Saturday night, well, that’s the best you’re going to find.
The Pirates have transformed into a confident, talented, fun-to-watch team that looks NCAA Tournament-bound. They have, in transfer point guard Budd Clark, the kind of floor general that reminds fans of head coach Shaheen Holloway. They have, in freshman forward Najai Hines, a legit post presence who had those same fans yelling “Baby Shaq!” as he owned Rutgers in the paint.
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They have hope where, less than a year ago, there was none. Holloway’s team was 7-25 overall and 2-18 in the Big East, the kind of humiliation that spurned the university and its donors to take action — which, in today’s college game, is spelled M-O-N-E-Y.
“I don’t want to keep talking about last year,” Holloway said, understandably, but his 10-1 team is a New Jersey basketball story that — for now — seems headed for a happy ending.
Seton Hall figured it out. That’s the glass-half-full take right now if you’re on the scarlet side of this rivalry following this 81-59 loss. It took a season that tested the sanity of everyone around this program — which, of course, is exactly what Rutgers is headed for over the next few months.
For those Rutgers fans who want to end with that sliver of hope, this is probably a good time to stop reading … and, for that matter, watching.
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The Scarlet Knights (5-6) look every bit as bad a team as Seton Hall was a year ago, maybe on track to be the worst team of the Steve Pikiell Era. It is hard to imagine them winning more than a handful of Big Ten games in what is going to be a long, cold, difficult winter.
In the first half of this one, they had as many shots blocked (six) as baskets made (on 22 attempts) with 13 turnovers. Holloway took one look at a Rutgers starting lineup with guard Jamichael Davis, the team’s one experienced ball handler, inexplicably coming off the bench, and said, “We’ve got to gap them early.” That’s exactly what Seton Hall did, forcing turnovers on six of the first seven Rutgers possessions to open an 11-0 lead.
It’s hard to fault Pikiell for trying something new, but at this point, it is painfully obvious that the answers are not sitting on his bench. This is a basketball team that does nothing well, and that includes the trifecta of defense, rebounding and effort that Pikiell built his program around when he broke that 30-year NCAA Tournament drought in 2021-22.
Clark controlled this game at the perimeter for Seton Hall with 16 points and seven assists, while Hines — who Clark called “a monster” — dominated in the paint. Pikiell will often point to the challenges of winning with a young team as one reason his program has struggled, but it was a teenager from Seton Hall schooling 25-year-old Rutgers center Emmanuel Ogbole in this one.
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Armed with an infusion of revenue-share money believed to be in the $6 million range, Holloway outbid N.C. State and others for the talented four-star big man out of Plainfield. Pikiell, meanwhile, is believed to be operating with about half that budget.
“With the right resources, I think you can turn things around in this day and age,” Pikiell said. “It’s a whole different world now we’re playing in.”
Money is the biggest factor, of course, but not the only one. Rutgers athletic director Keli Zinn is committed to providing Pikiell with increased funding to build his roster, but it is fair to wonder if the head coach — who so far has proven to be an inept general manager in the play-for-pay era — can figure out how to maximize his assets.
Rutgers used 12 players against Seton Hall. How many of them are truly Big Ten-caliber players? Two? Three? One year after going 15-17 with a pair of NBA lottery picks in Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, the Scarlet Knights are not just lacking talent. They don’t have a clear identity, either, and that’s a big problem.
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Holloway’s team made them look bad on Saturday night as they reclaimed the New Jersey-shaped trophy that comes with winning this rivalry game. A year ago, it was the Pirates who looked utterly hopeless as the Scarlet Knights celebrated a December win on a Harper buzzer beater.
Seton Hall figured it out. If you’re a Rutgers fan, that might be the only thing that gives you hope for the future right now.
MORE FROM STEVE POLITI:
How N.J. gymnast Livvy Dunne led a revolution in college sports
Late Rutgers star was a legend in my hometown — and, for a kid sportswriter, a savior
The untold story of how Rutgers crashed the Big Ten
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Last of the Lifers: Can a high school coach survive for half a century in today’s world?
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