AMHERST — There were a lot of teams around the Atlantic 10 that needed to hit the reset button this week.
The nonconference schedule was not kind to the league with eight teams finishing with seven wins or fewer in the first half of the season, and several teams taking questionable losses. UMass fits into that group after it fell to 7-6 overall with a 91-72 loss to Georgia on Sunday. The last five halves of basketball the Minutemen have played have not inspired a lot of confidence entering Saturday’s A-10 opener against La Salle at the Mullins Center.
Yet, in a league as open as the A-10, the clean slate is beneficial for UMass as it tries to squeeze the most out of its potential.
“The games we played in the past are in the past,” junior guard Luwane Pipkins said. “We’re just trying to focus on conference right now, we’re trying to just be the best that we can be, we’re not trying to focus on other teams too much. We just need to focus on us.”
After taking Monday off to recharge following the loss, UMass has returned with a new level of focus with conference play looming. Coach Matt McCall said he’s been pleased with the mentality and effort his team has shown in practice since coming back from Georgia, using stronger language in his approval than in recent weeks.
Even the players noticed a different attitude among the team with the most important 18 games of the year on the horizon.
“There’s just a new vibe to the team,” redshirt junior Jonathan Laurent said. “This new start is like nonconference play was our preseason. We had a lot of new players, lot of freshmen, lot of guys who sat out for a year and hadn’t played, I feel like those 13 games got the jitters, grit and grime out of us so we actually have players who know how college basketball is. How physical it is, how fast the game is, how fast-paced the other players are. It shows we actually have to go hard in practice every day to compete with these other teams.”
Most of that hard work will come on the defensive end, an area of the floor where UMass has struggled this season. Even excluding the 110 points Nevada scored against them over Thanksgiving, the Minutemen are still 13th out of 14 teams in scoring defense by allowing 73 points per game.
Defense has been a point of emphasis for McCall and his staff almost the entire season, but the improvement has been inconsistent at best for the Minutemen. The biggest issue UMass faces is fouls, committing 19.6 per game, the third most in the A-10. Opponents are scoring 21.3 percent of their points at the foul line while shooting 73.4 percent from the stripe.
“There’s definitely a point to keep preaching defense, defense wins championships,” Pipkins said. “I take pride in defense, my freshman year I played 94 feet. I can’t do it as well now because I’m a little banged up, but we need to emphasize it a lot with the whole team and then like (assistant coach Rasheen Davis) said if we hold teams to 65 points in the conference, we’ll win the conference and hopefully make the tournament.”
The easiest way for UMass to fix its defense is to have a good night on offense, a troubling trend that McCall is trying to break. The Minutemen’s best defensive performances have coincided with the times the Minutemen have been highly effective on offense. Yet when the shots aren’t falling, the defense has been mediocre as well, causing McCall to several times lament his team’s obsession with offense.
Laurent attributes some of that to the players still trying to adjust to playing with each other with so many new faces this year. But he also said it falls on the leaders like himself and Pipkins to help keep the morale high when bad events happen in a game. That is something McCall said will be a big difference to how successful UMass will be in conference play this year.
“Staying together when it’s not going well has also got to be a big key,” McCall said. “That’s something we’ve struggled with a lot this year is when something hasn’t gone well, maybe trying to do it by myself or maybe getting mad at a teammate and not talking to him the right way. That’s all a part of changing the culture and something we’ve got to learn.”
SCOUTING THE EXPLORERS — La Salle enters Saturday’s 1 p.m. contest with a 2-10 record, but it won its final two games before an extended break. Although the triumphs over Alabama A&M and Towson weren’t the most impressive feats, the Explorers were able to hang tough with Villanova despite not having two of their best players.
Both of those players – Pookie Powell and Saul Phiri – played in La Salle’s two wins at the Boardwalk Battle in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and were instrumental in the victories. Powell is leading the Explorers with 18.1 points per game despite missing three games with an injury. The Explorers also receive a boost from Isiah Deas off the bench with his 41.0 percent 3-point shooting and 12 ppg.
The two teams split their regular-season meetings last year with the home team winning each game, but the Minutemen were triumphant 69-67 in last year’s A-10 Tournament first-round contest.