St. Joe’s strong Atlantic 10 run shows these Hawks are ‘headed in the right direction’

“This team definitely has taken a lot of steps,” Xzayvier Brown said.

Rasheer Fleming, left, and coach Billy Lange of St. Joseph's in their press conference following their loss to VCU in a semifinal game in the Atlantic 10 Basketball Tournament on March 16, 2024.Read moreCharles Fox / Staff Photographer

Published March 17, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

NEW YORK — The first question asked of Billy Lange after his St. Joseph’s team was defeated Saturday in the Atlantic 10 semifinals was about whether the Hawks were worthy of a postseason opportunity. The beginning of his answer said a lot about where things are headed on Hawk Hill.

“I’m very boring, but I look at things in totality,” Lange said. “We’re a better call away from winning at Kentucky. We beat Princeton. We finished .500 in our league, tied for seventh. We beat a No. 1 seed [Richmond] in here. To me, it’s about the whole, the globalness of the season.”

St. Joe’s won 21 games. The Hawks had won 22 total in Lange’s first three seasons after he took over and mostly started from scratch following Phil Martelli’s firing in 2019. It wasn’t until last year that the Hawks sniffed at a .500 record, but Lange saw signs in the 16-17 season. Another strong recruiting class was on the way, highlighted by Xzayvier Brown, who would go on to become A-10 rookie of the year.

There were heightened expectations this time around. There were a few bumps, and a few injuries, but the Hawks mostly lived up to them. They walked off the Barclays Center floor Saturday afternoon after a 66-60 defeat, one win shy of playing for a trip to the NCAA Tournament, and who wouldn’t have signed up for that in the fall?

“This team definitely has taken a lot of steps,” said Brown, who has been around the program a lot longer than most freshmen since his stepfather, Justin Scott, is Lange’s associate head coach. “No team is perfect, we’re definitely not perfect, but you could just see over each game and each practice that we’re headed in the right direction.”

Perfect, the Hawks weren’t. A 10-3 nonconference run to open the season was met with an ugly 0-3 start to conference play, which was then followed by a 9-6 finish the rest of the regular season. There were injuries to Lynn Greer III and Christ Essandoko, poor shooting performances, and some struggles on the defensive end. But they arrived here in Brooklyn with more than a shooter’s chance, and a Hawks team that relies so much on a few underclassmen was edged by a VCU team that starts four seniors.

Saturday afternoon was also a lesson in how slim the margins are this time of year, not that Lange needed one. VCU’s Max Shulga made 10 of his 11 shots and led all scorers with 25 points. One or two misses might have flipped the script. So could a traveling call that wasn’t whistled against Shulga with the Hawks scrambling to foul, down three inside 20 seconds to go. Lange’s team, which relies a lot on its three-point shooting, made eight of its 27 attempts from the outside.

“There’s multiple turning points,” Lange said. Few of them went in the Hawks’ favor.

And so begins another offseason, which could come after a trip to a postseason tournament. There’s no telling what Lange’s roster will look like in the fall with the existence of the transfer portal, especially when it comes to first-team all-A-10 guard Erik Reynolds II. But the Hawks have solid NIL support and more on the way. They’re slated to play in the new Players Era tournament with some of the blue bloods in 2025-26 and 2026-27, which will offer each participating school $1 million in NIL money for participating, a big boon for an A-10 program (or any, for that matter).

They announced this week another trip to Barclays Center in the fall when the Hawks compete in the Legends Classic with Syracuse, Texas, and Texas Tech. There will be expectations again, Reynolds or no Reynolds.

A three-player recruiting class is on the way, and so is Camden’s Dasear Haskins, who redshirted this year. Lange pointed to that element of his program when reflecting on where things stand and where things are going. VCU, Lange said, is experienced and older, built on transfers because the roster was nearly emptied when Ryan Odom took over in March after leaving Utah State.

“We’re, as it stands currently, the exact opposite of that,” Lange said. “[We have] a bunch of guys who committed to St. Joe’s and lost a lot of games early, and you build a program, and I still think that’s the way to do it. [VCU is] older and they can compete and they know how to do it. But our guys are down 21-12 and they want to fight for each other and we take the lead at halftime. That’s the way we prefer to do it and, more importantly than what I want, it best reflects St. Joe’s. It’s a transformational university. It’s a transformational community. And I don’t think you can be transformational, for the most part, in and out.

“With that all being said, I have to grow as a leader and a steward of the program and be flexible in this new model. But watching this journey, seeing that locker room after, knowing that there’s genuine suffering because they care about each other and what they’ve poured into it, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

Lange paused for a second.

“Except a win,” he added.