Friars face champions
Sharing is caring. It’s a slogan that should be plastered in capital letters inside the Providence College basketball locker room. No font is too big.
In the days between his team’s New Year’s Eve loss to Creighton and Saturday’s 2 p.m. home game against defending national champion Villanova, coach Ed Cooley has gone to great lengths to stress the importance of making sure the ball keeps circulating. Like a river, there’s a constant flow that needs to take place. Otherwise, the offensive execution suffers and becomes susceptible to lengthy fieldgoal droughts.
Anyone who’s closely followed this year’s PC team knows that once or twice a game, the Friars will lull themselves to sleep with droughts of inefficiency. The Creighton game is best remembered for the Bluejays’ barrage of three-pointers, but Providence between the first and second halves went a combined seven minutes without a basket. That’s a tough storm to weather regardless of whether you’re facing a Big East team or a CYO team.
When it comes to assist numbers, there’s quite the disparity between Friar wins and losses. In the 10 wins, PC is averaging 15.4 assists per game. There have been some 11-assist outings (URI, Fairleigh Dickinson) mixed in with a 21-assist effort against Boston College and an even more impressive 26-assist performance versus Central Connecticut.
In the five Friar losses, the assist average shrinks to 9.6 helpers. Again, there have been some low points (six assists versus Michigan) mixed in with some high ones (19 against Wichita State).
“That means the ball isn’t moving,” said Cooley.
In the never-ending quest to explain why teams perform the way they do, the stark difference in the assist column between Providence wins and losses is quite telling.
“If our assists are up, that means we must be playing better,” said Cooley.
As he continued to talk about the need to pump more air into those assist figures, he referenced “you can’t play 31 minutes and have one assist.” That was the log that freshman David Duke turned in against Creighton.
“You’ve got to have high assist numbers when you’re on the floor that long,” said Cooley.
Duke might be the starting point guard, yet the onus of distribution can’t fall on him alone. Contributions must also come forward from sophomore Makai Ashton-Langford and junior Maliek White. Those are top three ballhandlers on PC’s roster.
“We need Makai, we need David, and we need Maliek. They have to be the guys who move the ball to the right pieces,” said Cooley.
With freshman A.J. Reeves still nursing a foot injury, the need for White to put the ball in the hoop has shifted his priorities away from the combo guard role he was uti- lized as during his freshman and sophomore years. Duke is still learning the Cooley way of running the point … how to press the issue when the opportunity is there and when to pull back. Since his DNP against UMass, Ashton-Langford has played no fewer than 19 minutes in any of the Friars’ four post-exam break contests. He’s averaging four assists over that stretch.
“I think he’s playing with more confidence,” said Cooley about Ashton-Langford. “At the end of the day, production is what gets you on the floor, not because you’re a great kid or have a wonderful smile. If you produce while you’re out there, you’re going to play. If you don’t, you won’t.”
One avenue for Cooley to consider is to allow more of the offense to run through junior Alpha Diallo, the current Friar assist leader (46) in addition to the leading scorer and rebounder. Diallo has been lauded for his versatility, hence it probably wouldn’t require too much more tapping of certain tools in his toolbox. Bryce Cotton, Kris Dunn and Kyron Cartwright certainly knew how to walk the fine line between scoring and assisting.
“We’re trying to,” said Cooley in response to unleashing Diallo’s point-guard side should dry spells continue from arguably the most critical position on the floor.
The Friars enter their matchup against Villanova tied for sixth in the 10-team Big East in assists (14.6) and second from the bottom in scoring (74.7 ppg). The 3.29 assists that Diallo is averaging is 13th best among conference performers. For a program that’s used to carrying the flag when it comes to the Big East’s leading assist guy, Providence is trying to recapture past magic without a true dominant point man at Cooley’s disposal.
“As I told the guys in the locker room [after the Creighton loss], ‘Let’s fail fast so we can learn quickly,” said Cooley.
The road to better days starts with a quickto-the-point message: sharing is caring.