Saints put streak on line vs. Stags
Winless less than two weeks ago, the Siena women’s basketball team finds itself playing host to a battle of two of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s top teams on Saturday. The Saints (4-10 overall, 4-2 MAAC) take a four-game winning streak into their 2 p.m. game against first-place Fairfield (10-5, 7-0) at UHY Center. Siena is in third place.
Siena is coming off Thursday’s stunning 82-44 road thrashing of Rider, a team that had beaten the Saints by 16 points a month earlier in Loudonville. It reflected Siena’s remarkable turnaround after an 0-10 start, the worst in program history. But if Siena has a chance to stamp itself as a true league contender by beating Fairfield, head coach Jim Jabir doesn’t want his players thinking that way.
“I told the kids in the locker room that the only thing I care about is that you play really, really hard and get better every day,” Jabir said during the bus ride home from Rider. “It doesn’t matter who we play. We can win every game on our schedule. We can lose every game on our schedule. I don’t want us thinking about our place in the league or what it means or what it doesn’t mean. We can do that at the banquet at the end of the year. I told them it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there may be a trophy at the banquet but I don’t want us getting ahead of ourselves.”
Against Rider, Siena won by its largest margin in 11 years, dating back to a 77-37 victory over Niagara on Jan. 14, 2011. The Saints outrebounded the Broncs 53-29 and shot 46.5 percent from the field, while holding Rider to 26.8 percent.
“Like I told the kids, we put a plan in place in the summer and we’re following the plan,” said Jabir, in the first year of his second stint at Siena. “I didn’t expect to beat them by 38, but I knew we were getting better and the only thing I keep telling the kids is that we have to defend and we have to be really tough and we have to make it ugly and make them feel uncomfortable, and they did that. … Our offense, we’re starting to read it better. That’s the best we’ve run zone offense in a long time. And then when they went man, we ran a lot of good stuff and got really good looks. Some of it was really, really pretty.”
Junior guard Anja Knoflach and freshman forward Anajah Brown had their best games as Saints. Knoflach, an Austrian junior college transfer, had a season-high 19 points. Brown had career highs with 15 points and 10 rebounds.
Knoflach missed time this season with an ankle injury while Brown was in COVID-19 protocols.
“I don’t think it’s (Knoflach’s) ankle, I think it’s her head,” Jabir said. “She doesn’t want to disappoint people. She doesn’t want to be seen as selfish. I told her, it’s selfish when you don’t shoot the ball because we’re struggling to score and that’s what we need … (Brown) has really struggled, even in practice, the last month. She’s missing bunnies. I told her you’ve really got to get in the gym and get better and I was on her pretty hard.”
They’ll take on Fairfield, on a seven-game winning streak under coach Joe Frager, who has announced his retirement effective at season’s end. Senior forward Lou Lopez-senechal, the MAAC Preseason Player of the Year, leads the league in scoring at 20.2 points per game for the Stags.
“They actually play very similarly to Rider,” Jabir said. “They play a lot of 2-3 zone. They’re way bigger than Rider. … They’ve got some really good scorers. I just think they’re pretty good and they’re senior-laden. They’re going to be really tough.”