Basketball rolls on without Xavier
Xavier’s season ended last night.
Dailyn Swain wasn’t to blame. He had an amazing game. Undoubtedly the best of his career. Zach Freemantle, sadly now the past of Xavier basketball, did not. He and Ryan Conwell will wonder what would have happened if a couple more shots fell.
This wasn’t a time where Xavier was a bounce or two away from the Sweet 16. It wasn’t Illinois’ interior defense or Xavier’s failure to go zone or much of anything that Xavier could control that ended this game. Illinois got red hot from deep. When they do that, really when they are even mediocre from deep, they can’t be beaten.
And with that this run was done. Back on New Year’s Eve I said that it was “auto bid or bust” for Xavier. The Musketeers, somehow, got in without that. They made it about as close as humanly possible, only UNC was closer to being eliminated, but they got in. It took 12-5 the rest of the way in the Big East. Xavier didn’t exactly flip a switch, but they got it done.
And now it’s done. We are, of course, still watching basketball, but there isn’t that tension that comes with Xavier having a game coming up. They don’t. We were spared the unique torture of having to pretend to care about the desiccated corpse of the NIT or whatever the Crown is, but the season is over nonetheless. There are schools desperate to win any sort of anything that will still play in those tournaments, but those games are without any sort of narrative drive. Villanova and UC will still play games, but even their fans don’t care.
Xavier’s fans do care, but their season is over. It ended when a terrible shooting team suddenly got hot. That was it. There was that moment with under a minute to go where you could see it dawn on the Xavier players. Will Riley was still celebrating, and God bless him, he deserved to, and Xavier shirts came untucked and hands went up to heads.
All of this rambling is to say that the season is done. It sucks. This team maybe didn’t deserve more, they probably found their level, but I wanted to watch them play more. Dailyn Swain and Ryan Conwell might be back. John Hugley might be back with Cam Fletcher. Nik Lewis and Jayden Forsythe will join. That’s the nucleus of a good team, but there are a lot of spaces to fill in there.
And that’s before the scavenging of the portal. It’s fait accompli that Trey Green is gone. At this point last season I would have told you that Des Claude would be a big part of the team the this season. He wasn’t. It seems like Dailyn Swain will be back, but who is to say in this new world.
That’s where I am a day after Xavier got knocked out. It’s not fun. Hopefully next November we won’t have a team still putting itself together.