Kenny Hasbrouck shouldn’t expect to get the Stephen Curry treatment tonight.
First of all, Hasbrouck isn’t Curry, the Davidson shooting star who had a breakout NCAA tournament last year.
And second, Hasbrouck simply hasn’t been shooting very well lately.
Loyola head coach Jimmy Patsos made national headlines last week by employing a bizarre two-for-one defense against Curry that resulted in no points for Curry, but a 78-48 loss for Loyola.
Siena (2-3) will open the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference season at Reitz Arena in Baltimore at 7 tonight against the Greyhounds, who won both regular-season games against the Saints last year before losing by two points in the semifinals of the MAAC tournament.
Hasbrouck, a senior co-captain guard and Siena’s best player, shot 29.4 percent from the field during three losses at the Old Spice Classic, after making 55.5 percent of his shots in wins over Boise State and Cornell.
“He just needs to bust out with one good game to get himself back,” Siena head coach Fran McCaffery said.
Hasbrouck did that against Loyola in the MAAC tournament last year.
After being held scoreless in the first half, when the Saints fell behind by as many as 17 points, Hasbrouck scored 17 in the second half and delivered the game-winning pass to Josh Duell for a wild, high-banking shot that rattled through to make it 65-63 with 19.9 seconds left, one of the most memorable shots of the season.
At the Old Spice, Hasbrouck was 1-for-10 against Tennessee, 6-for-14 against Wichita State, including a missed layup just before the buzzer that could have sent the game into overtime, and 3-for-10 against Oklahoma State.
He might still need some time to figure out a balance between his scoring and a new role playing some point guard to spell Ronald Moore.
“He’s turning down shots that he normally takes without thinking about it,” McCaffery said after the Oklahoma State game on Sunday. “He’s trying to be unselfish, he’s an unselfish guy. He wants our team to be successful. He’s got other good players around him, so he’s trying to make plays. I also played him at the point some. That’s something he’s struggled with in the past, because it takes away from his aggressiveness, offensively, when you’re playing the point.”
Hasbrouck said the Saints as a team need to be more aggressive, especially when switching from defense to offense.
Siena likes to run, but didn’t get much opportunity to do that on a continual basis at the Old Spice.
“We’ve got to play to our tempo,” he said. “A lot of times, we played slower than we usually do. We tried to slow it down because we weren’t in the lead. We weren’t playing to win, we were playing not to lose. Things like that, we’ve got to try to incorporate into the game and just be ourselves and play as hard as we can and let the game flow.”
Loyola is 2-5 after the Davidson loss and a 64-62 defeat at Vermont on Saturday.
The Greyhounds have wins over Tennessee State and James Madison.
In the Davidson game, Patsos had two players double-team Curry, no matter what. By the third possession, Curry, the son of former NBA star Dell Curry, simply stationed himself in the corner, leaving three Greyhounds to guard four Davidson players.
Curry finished 0-for-3 for the game; as a consequence of Patsos’ strategy, his top scorer, Brett Harvey, who was assigned to Curry, also went without any points.
“Every dead ball, I asked them how long they were going to do this,” Curry, who came into the contest averaging 35 points a game, told The Associated Press afterward. “They really didn’t say anything. They weren’t very conversational about it.”
“We had to play against an NBA player tonight,” Patsos said in the AP story. “Anybody else ever hold him scoreless? I’m a history major. They’re going to remember that we held him scoreless or we lost by 30?”
Siena, which has been on the road since last Tuesday, will bus back after the game, and get ready for Saturday’s home game against UAlbany.
“Traveling’s tough, but we enjoy the road trips and the team camaraderie, but it takes a toll on your body, so we’re looking forward, after having a good game against Loyola, to getting back and getting some rest for Albany,” sophomore center Ryan Rossiter said.
“We’ve got league play coming, so we definitely have to be focused,” junior forward Edwin Ubiles said. “We’ve got three losses, and hopefully, we can pick ourselves up for the next game.
“Conference play is the most important part of the season. We had a lot of turnovers [at Old Spice], and we’re not a turnover team. We have to take care of the ball, get to the free-throw line and we have to make sure we bring it from the start every day, every night. I think we’re going to be alright, we just have to bounce back. We didn’t want to lose three games out here, but it happens. We just all have to learn from it, from the starting five to the bench players.”
In the three Old Spice games,
Siena had 37 assists against 51 turnovers.
Harvey leads the Greyhounds at 13.9 points per game, and Brian Rudolph, the MAAC co-rookie of the year last season, has been quiet offensively, so far, but is averaging five assists a game.
Categories: College Sports
