AMHERST — The beauty of the Atlantic 10 basketball schedule is that a team is only as good as its last game.
A thrilling upset on a Wednesday night can be overshadowed quickly by a lackluster performance on Saturday, and the reverse is just as applicable. That might be what has made this year’s UMass season such a difficult one for fans to swallow. All four of the Minutemen’s conference wins were followed by defeats, and three of them could be considered fairly ugly losses, too.
The latest in that string was Saturday’s 94-75 loss at Rhode Island in which the Minutemen trailed by as many as 31 in the first half. The setback came after a dominant 87-79 win over Richmond last Wednesday in the home finale, arguably the best 40-minute performance UMass (11-20, 4-14 Atlantic 10) has had this season.
“Wednesday night was an emotional night, one of the better games we’ve played all year,” coach Matt McCall said. “That’s the thing about basketball, you’ve got to turn right around and do it again. The turnovers were a problem (against Rhode Island), the effort and the energy were a problem. If you look to the start we got off to, we didn’t get off to a terrible start, it just started to get away from us at the 14-minute mark in the first half. We scored on the first possession of the game, we just couldn’t get stops early and that kind of deflated us.”
The beauty of the league schedule reaches an apex this week for the conference tournament, where each day is a new chance to prolong a season. In UMass’ case, it needs to win five times in five days to realize the faint dream of postseason basketball, a journey that begins Wednesday against George Washington at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
McCall said there are certain games when he can sense whether or not UMass is ready to take the floor, but Saturday’s performance at Rhode Island was not one of them. He said he thought the odd schedule for the trip, the hotel being further away from the arena than normal and not having shootaround, might have thrown off his team. However, some of the Minutemen’s best games of the season – an 84-62 dismantling of Southern Illinois in Las Vegas on Nov. 22 and a 54-52 win over Davidson on Feb. 9 – came in similar situations.
Either way, McCall said these are the games that every player should dream about and should be self-motivated enough to play well.
“It’s under the lights in Brooklyn,” McCall said. “If you can’t get yourself revved up for that, you should be doing something else. That’s the bottom line.”
PREVIOUS MEETING — The 12th-seeded Colonials (8-23, 4-14) thoroughly defeated the Minutemen during the regular-season matchup in February after using an early 18-4 run to assert control over the game. For the rematch, UMass has worked on its offense against George Washington’s zone, which was a trouble point for it in the game.
“The last time, we were really, really bad against their zone executing offense,” McCall said. “I think we’re a better zone offense executing team after playing Richmond, but we were really bad (against GW), we didn’t know what to look for, where their gaps and openings are in their zone, our frontcourt players did a bad job posting up. It was one of the worst games we’ve played all year, by far.”
PIPKINS DONE — Luwane Pipkins’ UMass career is likely over after being ruled out of the Atlantic 10 Tournament with his nagging hamstring injury. The junior guard, who announced last week he was going to transfer after graduating in May, hurt the muscle on Feb. 2 at Saint Joseph’s and missed six of the next seven games with the injury. He returned last week to play against Richmond and Rhode Island, but clearly looked hobbled and didn’t have his usual burst of speed.
Pipkins will finish his three-year run as a Minuteman with 1,416 points through 90 games, good for 13th in program history. He leaves holding the school record for points in a game (44), steals in a game (eight) and 3-pointers in a game (eight).