Rider doesn’t have much to celebrate this holiday season
LAWRENCEVILLE » There won’t be any holiday cheer around the Rider men’s basketball team this week. Not on the floor, at least. The Broncs (1-6, 1-3) have dropped four straight games and are coming off dismal non-conference loss to NJIT on Wednesday, which has left ninthyear coach Kevin Baggett looking for answers before the team breaks for Christmas and returns to action on Dec. 29 against Coppin State at Alumni Gymnasium.
“We’ll go back to work, and whoever shows up is going to be coached,” Baggett said following that dispiriting, 81-66, setback to NJIT. “We’re going to get better.”
Rider’s not good on either end of the floor right now, getting outscored by nearly nine points per game (77.668) and allowing opponents to shoot 48.1%. That number ranks the Broncs 303rd out of 329 eligible teams in field goal percentage defense.
“We have to get better on defense as a team,” junior guard Dwight Murray Jr. said. “We came together as a team and we’re like ‘we got to play harder in practice.’ It starts in practice (with) gap help, rebounding and stopping secondchance baskets.”
Meanwhile, the ball is not going through the hoop nearly enough to make up for defensive lapses. Rider is only connecting at a 42% rate (35% from 3) and lacks the firepower to overcome double-digit deficits, which it has found itself chasing in each of the last three games.
Baggett was asked if misfiring offensively was impacting the defense and vice versa.
“We got too many guys
whose mentality is their offense dictates their defense, which has been a problem from Day 1 for us that I noticed right away,” Baggett said. “Our energy should feed off the defensive end and carry us to the offensive end. We have that backwards in this program right now with this group.”
To be fair, the deck is stacked against the Broncs. It was always going to be difficult to integrate 12 new players, but set against the Covid pandemic that canceled the summer session,
Baggett and his staff haven’t had the time to work with the incoming group of freshmen. He didn’t hand debuts to freshmen Jordan Smalls and Lawrence Foreman until the second half of Wednesday’s loss. Nehemiah Benson and Jaelen McGlone haven’t played much either, although Benson is in the nine-man rotation.
Baggett said they’ve been trying to do the player development work that would have been done in the summer during the season and rely on the team’s older
players who are physically ready to play Division I basketball in the MAAC.
“We have enough guys to be able to help us score,” Baggett said. “It’s not just about the experienced guys, it’s about everybody. We got to count on one another.”
There were positive signs early of a team that would be better than the lastplace finish it is forecasted for. There was a three-point loss at St. John’s — a game it really should have won — and an 18-point victory over Manhattan in the MAAC
opener. Those, however, do look like fool’s gold as St. John’s is showing itself to be Big East fodder and Manhattan got swept at home by Marist last weekend.
Still, with 16 MAAC games remaining, it’s too soon to write this off as a lost season.
“This is a team, it’s not an individual thing,” Baggett said. “We have to get better as a team. It’s WE. From the coaches down to the players, WE have to get better. Not individually, not I, WE.”