True believers: NU out to punch ticket

Bill Coen has been around long enough to know not to put too much weight into preseason polls. At the midmajor level, in his eyes, there are a lot of unknowns before the season begins.

For his Northeastern team, that was certainly the case.

But when this season’s poll came out in October, it got his players’ attention. The Huskies were picked sixth in the CAA, and they didn’t have a single player on the first or second all-conference teams.

They saw it as a slight. “Seeing that we were picked the sixth-best team in the league was something that we took personally,” sophomore guard Shawn Occeus said. “Each and every day we worked to prove people wrong.”

There was some logic to the ranking. Northeastern lost league player of the year T.J. Williams and Alex Murphy to graduation. With just one senior, it was a young team growing into new roles, and no one knew what the Huskies would get from transfer Vasa Pusica. It showed with some growing pains in November.

“We knew that we were better than that and we just wanted to prove everybody wrong,” Pusica said.

Northeastern (21-9, 14-4) earned a share of the CAA regular-season championship and the No. 2 seed in the conference tournament, where they’ll begin in the quarterfinals tonight in North Charleston, S.C., against either Delaware or Elon.

When the league’s regularseason awards were handed out on Friday, the Huskies were all over them. Coen earned his first coach of the year award, Pusica was the runner-up for player of the year, Occeus was named the defensive player of the year, Bolden Brace earned the sixth man of the year, and Tomas Murphy was selected to the all-rookie team.

Northeastern is no longer an unknown commodity.

“It’s a little easier to get their attention when it’s like that,” Coen said. “I think guys come in with a little bit of edge and want to prove that they’re worthy. …

“They dug in, and it resulted in us getting better throughout the year. We still have a long way to go, but I think we’ve been on a constant improving trend, and I think that’s a credit to the guys in the locker room.”

The Huskies bring a seven-game winning streak into the tournament. Their last loss came on Feb. 1 against Charleston, the tourney’s top seed.

After that game, they had a conversation.

“We were talking about it and we agreed that we needed to have a seven-game winning streak going into the tournament,” Pusica said. “So we knew that we could do that and pull it off.”

Pusica credited the team’s four-game losing streak in November as a lesson it needed. As roles evolved, Coen has pressed the right buttons. He made the decision to take Devon Begley, his lone senior and only remaining player from NU’s last NCAA tourney team (2015), out of the starting lineup, and his players have responded well to different situations.

Now, they’re just three games to glory.

“Like our coach always says, it’s the best time of the year,” Begley said.