I’ve put off checking this thread since the season came to its abrupt end. I was sitting in a hotel bar in Portland, OR on the last Sat in Feb, watching PC beat Nova in Philly. Exhilarating. Then, still playing with backs against the wall, holding off an equally desperate Xavier team at home. Finally on 3/7, demolishing DePaul in front of a sellout crowd at the Dunk, which was an amazing environment. I knew about COVID-19, obviously, and heard rumors the NCAA tournament might be played without fans. But I had no doubt I’d be seeing the Friars play at MSG in a few short days.
The post above says it well: This team had real potential, and I feel for the kids who never got the chance to find out. As a fan, if there is a faint silver lining, I guess it’s that for every postseason team but one, it ends bitterly. With this team, we’ll just never know. And as much as that sucks and I desperately would have liked to see it play out, we’ll fondly remember the 2019-2020 team as a group who fought back from the bleakest Nov/Dec in memory to the point that they were a tournament lock and playing the best basketball we’ve seen in Providence in a long time. It was a lot of fun.
Alpha Diallo and the vintage of Luwane Pipkins we saw down the stretch will be tough to replace. We’ll also miss Emmitt Holt, Maliek White, and Kalif Young as graduating seniors. But if we take a moment to distract ourselves and look forward to the possibility of basketball this winter, a very talented group returns. Cooley has also secured the future with impact transfers for the second straight offseason, with Syracuse guard Brycen Goodine (presumably sit 1, play 3) and LaSalle rebounding machine Ed Croswell (sit 1, play 2). The two-man recruiting class of wings Jyare David and Alyn Breed is less heralded than recent classes, partially because there is very little playing time to be had in the short-term.
Stay well, everyone. We’ll be back. Go Friars.