Stony Brook Drops Sloppy Game To Pride

Coach Pikiell was not happy with his teams play in the first half of its 61-56 loss at Pritchard Gym on Wednesday night.

"It was a great atmosphere and I appreciate people coming out. We weren't poised in the first half. I thought we played a terrible first half. Demitrius, thank god showed up with some points. We were very emotional, the sign of a young team. Our starters really didn't get us off to a good start, and we kind of battled from that. We battled in the second half, we outrebounded a team thats +27 on the glad in the last 2 games. But we got ourselves into a whole in the first half and you cant do that against a good basketball team."

Desmond Adedeji battled in the paint all night. He had eight rebounds and three blocks in his 16 minutes, but was outdone by Hofstra's big man Dane Johnson who had six points and five rebounds in his 21 minutes. Johnson also blocked six shots and changed countless others just with his presence in the middle.



Neto was out in full force, cheering on his former teammates, and yelling at the refs when he thought they gave the Seawolves a raw deal.


Demetrius Young was the Seawolves savior, coming off the bench and scoring 21 points and grabbing nine rebounds in 22 minutes.

"He did a great job," Pikiell said. "He was poinsed. He's a veteran, he's been playing great in practice."

He showed some of that poise later in the game. A few minutes a minor scuffle ensued under the Hofstra basket, sophomore guard Chris Martin made an acrobatic lay up while being fouled.

He got up, and whether his glare was just out of excitement or in response to the rough Hofstra play, Young came over and smacked him in the back of the head, asking him "What the (expletive) are you doing man?"

Martin regained his composure and sunk the free throw that brought Stony Brook within three.

More from Coach Pikiell:

"We were trying to slow it down. We can't play with them, they're a 70+ point team and they scored 90 in their last game. We're not ready to do that yet. We didn't do a good job, we needed a seven or eight turnover game and we need to make free throws. We didn't make big plays when we needed to and i just thought we were really emotional. Our starting group was just very emotional in the beginning of the game and didn't really calm down until the second half. I like this basketball team, we're gonna be good, but we still got a lot of figuring out to do."

"I was disappointed just in our compuse, just in our turnovers at bad times. I was really disappointed in our first half and we started off the game poorly. You can't do that in a game like this, you can't have a bad five minutes, bad four minutes, three minutes when you're playing good basketball teams."

-- Gene Morris
-- Photos by Alex Berkman