After tough start, MC rounding into form

After stumbling through their first five conference games entering last week, about the last thing the Manhattan Jaspers men’s basketball team needed was a date with first-place Rider University. And on Friday the 13th of all days. 

Talk about your ominous signs. Add in the fact that the Jaspers are still playing without the services of stellar senior guard Rich Williams, and if they didn’t have bad luck this season, they wouldn’t have any luck at all. 

But on a night that saw Rider, the penthouse residents in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), get 24 points and 14 rebounds from Kahill Thomas and outrebound the Jaspers, 46-36, Manhattan got a career night from junior Zane Waterman. who helped engineer a victory that just might turn the Jaspers’ season around. 

Waterman scored a career-high 35 points, including 10 of the Jaspers’ final 11 points of the game in the final 2:16, and junior guard Zavier Turner added 23 points as he went 12-of-14 from the free throw line as Manhattan posted its’ second straight conference win with a hard-fought 76-73 victory over Rider at Draddy Gym. 

The victory boosted Manhattan’s overall record to 7-11, and after its 78-69 win over Niagara earlier in the week, the Jaspers are now 2-5 in the MAAC and surprisingly just 2 ½ games out of first place. 

“I thought we showed signs of vintage what we do in the sense of speeding [Rider] up and making them miss some easy shots,” Manhattan head coach Steve Masiello said. “It was a good win. I’m proud of the guys but we have to get a lot better if we want to achieve our goals of what matters at Manhattan.” 

That goal this year, as always, is to be rounding into championship form once the MAAC Tournament rolls around in March. The Jaspers have been to the title game of the tournament in three of the past four seasons and won two championships. And if they continue to get huge production out of Waterman, rising star, they just might be a team to be reckoned with again this March.  

The 6-8 Waterman chose to play down his late-game heroics that saw him score nine straight points in a span of 1:44, including a three-pointer, a three-point play and three free throws. But when the dust finally settled from Waterman’s offensive outburst, Manhattan, which trailed for the majority of the game, was holding its largest lead of the game at 74-67 with 32 seconds to play. 

But there was a reason why Rider came into the game as the MAAC top dog and the team wasn’t about to go quietly. On the Broncs’ next possession, Thomas drilled a three-pointer to pull Rider within, 74-70 with 22.5 seconds remaining. Then when Turner stepped out of bounds on Manhattan’s next possession, Rider took all of four seconds before Jimmie Taylor nailed a three-ball of his own, and all of a sudden, Manhattan’s lead was 74-73 with 18.7 seconds to go. 

Waterman added a free throw at the 18.0 mark for a two-point Jaspers lead and when Thomas couldn’t convert on a layup on Rider’s last possession, it was Waterman – who else? – grabbing the rebound, getting fouled and sinking one final free throw to round out the scoring with 0.9 seconds to play. 

“I wasn’t looking to take over [the game] at all,” said Waterman, whose previous career high as the 26 points he dropped on Fairfield on Jan. 5. “It was just that my teammates were finding me in good spots.” 

Masiello is a defensive coach at his core and while he’ll certainly take an offensive barrage like Waterman’s, he knows, as do the Jaspers, that they will only go as far this season as their defense takes them. 

“I’m very happy for him. He had a monster night,” Masiello said of Waterman. “And I’m happy for Z [Zavier Turner]. Even on a bad night he got to the free throw line [sinking 12-of-14 free throws]. But there’s more to it than getting points. That’s not sexy to us and I think that’s a theme throughout our program. These guys are about jewelry, winning championships. That’s what we care about.” 

With two straight MAAC wins, the clouds are starting to part from a stormy start to the Jaspers season. But recent history has shown Manhattan has an uncanny ability to recover from slow starts. 

“I think it helps the young guys [mentally] but I’ll continue to say this: Yes, we want to win. We don’t want to be 2-5. We wish we were 15-3,” Masiello said. “But it’s all about winning in March as long as we get better every time we take the court. Now I didn’t like Fairfield [a 97-79 loss]. I didn’t like our game against them because I didn’t recognize our team. I didn’t recognize us period. But everything else, we’re going in the right direction. That’s what matters. You hope that equates to winning and we have great faith over our years here that it does in February and March. The numbers speak for themselves. We get off to slow starts but I think we’re trending the right way. But we have so much more we need to get better at.”