SAINT LIFE GRAND
No. 15 Peacocks have shot at another magical March run
The placement in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference preseason poll said it all. Forget about what happened two years ago, the magical Elite Eight run — the spellbinding wins even the most accurate predictions couldn’t foreshadow — that captivated Jersey City.
Most of the remnants are gone. It’s what happens. These Cinderella runs are unimaginable dreams before they happen, and they’re nearly impossible to replicate. The Peacocks went 14-18 last season, falling in the MAAC semifinals, and plummeted to No. 10 in this year’s poll.
They took incremental strides toward surpassing those expectations by winning their first five conference games and earning the tournament’s fifth seed, and then across three days this past week, they shattered them. That was the reason why everyone piled into the sixth floor of the Mac Mahon Student Center, where no one seemed to care about the No. 15 seed next to Saint Peter’s and the No. 2 seed printed next to Tennessee, which it’ll face Thursday in Charlotte, during the selection show.
“Just a competitor, that kind of burns you up,” assistant coach Umar Shannon, part of Shaheen Holloway’s staff in 2022, told The Post about the poll, adding it was “definitely motivation” and something coaches mentioned. “I thought that was kind of a lack of respect.”
So they found a way to become MAAC champions again, defeating Fairfield on Saturday. There was a confetti cannon and a watch party 21 hours later. And this time, the Peacocks won’t enter the NCAA Tournament with an element of mystique, of no one quite knowing what this group of defensive-minded players could accomplish when the preseason projections of October give way to the chaos of March.
“That was the goal in coming here and taking over for coach [Shaheen Holloway]: keeping this program at an NCAA Tournament level,” head coach Bashir Mason said. “So the fact that we’ve done it, in my opinion, ahead of schedule, even better.”
Because for all of the reasons this group is different from Holloway’s team that knocked off Kentucky, Murray State and Purdue, they’ll always be linked. The “Peacock magic,” Mason said, with the net cut Saturday draped around his neck. Some of their defining traits remain the same, too. Saint Peter’s possessed the No. 21 defense for effective field goal percentage and No. 32 for turnover percentage, according to Bart Torvik.
The metrics reflected that nothing really changed when Holloway left for Seton Hall, Mason — once the youngest Division-I coach at Wagner in 2012 — arrived and Saint Peter’s constructed the future of its program on a foundational NCAA Tournament run that took nearly eight decades to materialize.
“What makes the defense work is what makes the program go,” Shannon told The Post. “It’s just the overall toughness. You gotta be tough. We believe toughness wins.”
There were holdovers. Two 2021-22 redshirts in Brent Bland and Mouhamed Sow. An assistant in Shannon. And, perhaps most importantly, a guard in Latrell Reid who arrived from Coffeyville Community College in 2021 and then developed into a cornerstone.
But only four players — Bland, Sow, Reid and Corey Washington — donned the Peacocks’ uniform last year, and Mason used his first MAAC slate to decipher what type of players he needed. They journeyed from a variety of destinations, from Richmond (starting guard Marcus Randolph) to the now-defunct St. Francis College in Brooklyn (Roy Clarke), and Saint Peter’s would inevitably encounter growing pains with the collection of junior college players, incoming freshman and incumbents.
When Mason attended the MAAC’s preseason meetings in Atlantic City, though, he listened to Rider head coach Kevin Baggett — with his team No. 1 in the poll — address the honor and add, “I got eight new players on my team.”
“Oh, we got eight new players on our team as well,” Mason recalled thinking, “so if the No. 1 seed, preseason No. 1 team, has eight new players, why can’t we win it?’”
That’s what makes the NCAA Tournament special. They have “nothing to lose,” Mason said. The pressure will be on Tennessee, he added, while Washington, the MAAC tournament MVP, predicted the Peacocks have “another one in us.”
All that’s needed is a chance for the improbable to become fact, and for the facts to begin to shape the modern junctures of a program’s timeline. Two years ago, that happened for the Peacocks.
And in four days, they’ll have another opportunity.