Danes seek answers
Brown says his young team lacks consistency after defeat by Maine
Coach says young team lacks consistency after defeat by Maine.
To the victor goes the spoils and to the victims a chance to examine the carnage.
An afternoon start time Saturday gave University at Albany basketball coach Will Brown plenty of time to evaluate an unexpected, if not stunning, 66-62 home loss to Maine.
Brown, in his 18th full season in charge, used nine minutes and one second to answer the first question — “Do you feel like this is another step back?” — at his postgame news conference.
He offered plenty of insight after a loss against the bottom feeders of the America East, a team that had only one previous Division I victory and hadn’t won a game at SEFCU Arena since 2011.
“There’s no panic button for me,” Brown said. “There’s probably a lot of people thinking, holy cow, what happened to Albany? They lost to Maine. That’s a discredit to Maine. (First-year coach) Richard Barron’s doing a good job. They’ve had some bad bounces.”
Ualbany (5-12, 0-2) was spared the disgrace of a blowout loss with a late rally. Maine (3-15, 1-2) led by 16 with 2:40 to play before the Great Danes went on an 11-0 run over the next 95 seconds.
“That’s how we’re going to have to play every game for 40 minutes,” said Ahmad Clark, who led the Danes with 22 points. “We can’t come out relaxed and thinking we’re going to win by scoring and not playing defense. We’ve got to play with a sense of urgency and defend and rebound.”
If there isn’t a sense of urgency now, there should be.
Having absorbed two conference losses at home, Ualbany is on the road Wednesday night at Umass-lowell and next Saturday afternoon against Maryland-baltimore County. The Danes then return home to face Stony Brook and Hartford,
two of the top three teams in the America East.
“We’ve got to continue to get better,” Brown said. “We’re going to do something every night that no other team in our league is going to do, we’re going to put four freshmen in the starting lineup that are going to eat up a lot of minutes.
“Some days they’re really good. Some days some of them are good. Some days they all struggle. That’s life. It’s us and Duke the only two teams that start four freshmen, and Duke’s four freshmen are probably a tad bit more advanced than our four freshmen and a little more experienced.”
Cameron Healy is the only one of the five freshmen
in the playing rotation who is contributing consistently. He had 15 points and no turnovers but has been a defensive liability.
“Coming out of a timeout,” Brown said, “we’ve got four freshmen looking at me, all doing this (nodding). We came out in what was supposed to be a 1-2-2 three-quarters-court pressure, and it looked like 1-2-1 and Cameron was getting a pretzel at the concession stand. I have no idea where he was or what he was doing.”
Freshman starters
Adam Lulka, Antonio Rizzuto and Brent Hank combined for seven points in 72 minutes. Malachi de Sousa had one point in seven minutes off the bench. Clark, Healy and senior Devonte Campbell (nine points) accounted for 74 percent of the Danes’ scoring.
“We’re not going to win games if Ahmad and Cameron don’t get help offensively,” Brown said. “We scored 28 points in the first half. Say what you want about defense and all that, we didn’t score enough points.
“Lulka’s simple. He’s passive. That’s his personality, that’s his demeanor. If you yell and scream at him, he smiles. He doesn’t get mad, he smiles. He needs to be aggressive. I’ve told him this, he guards himself better than anybody.”
The Danes are on pace for their worst season
since 2003-04, when they finished 5-23 overall,
3-15 in the America East. They’ve had seven straight seasons of 19 or more victories, but extending that streak is coming close to a mathematical impossibility.
“If anybody’s going to get us, you’d better get us right now,” Brown said. “We’re going to be good, our future’s bright, but we’ve got to understand that we need more of a sense of urgency, got to stop the bleeding, got to start helping ourselves more than what we are.
“There’s times when we look like a well-oiled machine, and there’s times we look like the Bad News Bears. There’s no in-between. We just don’t have Engelberg whipping out a Snickers from his back pocket and chomping on it during the game.”