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BY MIKE VORKUNOV
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
VILLANOVA, PA – It is as if Yogi Berra is narrating the season at this point for Seton Hall. He must be, because that seems the only way to describe last night's 81-71 loss to No. 2 Villanova.
It wasn't déjà vu, but it was something like it.
The script, by now, has been set, and played out several times. It doesn't always go down the same way but the final scene hasn't changed. And it's never pretty for the Pirates.
Once again Seton Hall found a way to hang with a Big East beast, this time the second ranked team in the country. The Pirates fought, they scratched, they clawed, and they withstood a 12-point deficit in the first half to tie it up.
They ebbed and flowed with the Wildcats for nine minutes, once again roping in that incredulous part of the mind that believes that anything is possible.But that's where déjà vu set in.
"If we played them at home we'd have a chance," Gonzalez said afterwards. "Obviously that's an easy cop-out, but I just think it's a good matchup tonight. They just outplayed us ... It was a difficult challenge, and we were in the mix. You look at the numbers and it doesn't mean we're not supposed to win, but we were up against a lot. When push came to shove and we were right there, they responded like great teams are supposed to respond."
Don't those words sound familiar in some facsimile?
Close but not quite good enough. It seems like Seton Hall leads the Big East in half-victories and almost theres.
The Pirates rode Jeremy Hazell for as long as they could, until he began to outplay himself. The knock on Hazell, and his saving grace, is that he can keep you in games by himself and he can shoot you out of them. If you needed more evidence, last night was Exhibit A.
The tipping point came with 9:41 remaining and the game tied at 62. At that point Hazell had scored all of his 32 points, 15 alone in the second half already. If it weren't for him, who knows where the Pirates would be. Definitely not in this game.
Then the wrong side of Hazell came out. He had been efficient up to that point, letting the game come to him. But driven by hubris or gluttony he could no longer settle for that. He attempted to dominate the game. Off-balance threes coming off screens, double-clutch shots in traffic, trying to bank catch and pop elbow jumpers off an inbounds pass. You can only get away with so many of those until you pass your coach's threshold. Hazell passed it.
Gonzalez benched him with 4:05 remaining, the game perhaps not in doubt but not quite out of reach. Crazier things had happened, ten point deficits had been erased in 50 seconds.
But there was a lesson to be taught.
"You can't just all of a sudden go 1-on-5 and putting your head down and looking for the refs to bail you out and complaining on every call and taking bad shots," said Gonzalez.
"Because then it's not good for the team, the offense, the coaching staff, it's just not good. It's not the way you want to play college basketball. I wouldn't be doing a good job of teaching him; I'm not helping him. So basically I took him out and I told him ‘Jeremy you can go 1-on-1 and you can be forceful, press and look for some shots but you can't just come down every time and take bad double-clutch shots. You don't get points for degree of difficulty with guys tackling you and then complain to the officials,' because even the officials started getting frustrated with him. It was just a chance for me to be a leader and try to teach him something that could help him."
Hazell didn't get his chance to explain his side of the story. Gonzalez gave him a strong rebuke and it just wasn't right to let him face the ravenous microphones and cameras.
"I kind of got into him pretty good so I don't think he was in the best spirits for the media," he said explaining the decision.
