Xavier has been bad before, rarely have they seemed so uninspired.
This article is going to read as very critical of Xavier basketball. In a lot of ways it is. I’m not advocating for a change at head coach; I think that would be a horrible decision. I’m not campaigning for a kid to lose a scholarship; that would be cruel. Xavier’s season has been hamstrung by major injuries to Zach Freemantle and Jerome Hunter. The losses of Kam Craft and Reid Ducharme deprived the team of shooting and depth. Recently Sasa Ciani and Dailyn Swain have gone down for the year as well. That is six scholarship players out. That’s the caveat to anything that follows.
Last night, though, Xavier just didn’t show up. The fact that the game started with a turnover off a simple dribble handoff was probably not a positive indicator. Xavier actually managed to lead 4-3. Then Butler went on a 17-0 run. It wasn’t necessarily that Xavier’s effort wasn’t there, it was that they couldn’t do anything right. When the score bottomed out at 20-4, X had an 11.9% (10.9% if you prefer ESPN) chance of winning. The game was functionally over with 35 minutes left to play.
That’s a problem, and it’s not a new one. Oakland jumped on Xavier early, Villanova had a 12-2 run in the first half, St. John’s had multiple eight point first half leads, UConn… well, yeah, Marquette just buried X before the half, and Seton Hall had an early 18-2 run that they followed up with a 12-2 run in the same half. Maybe none of those, excepting UConn, were as bad as last night, but all of them were games in which Xavier played badly early and had to rally. Those are just the ones that come to mind that X didn’t manage to overturn. There is no team in the nation that is better in the second half compared to the first as Xavier, but increasingly it seems like that is because Xavier is so awful early.
Last night Xavier kept going, but only the incredible incompetence of Butler kept them in it. Butler went 11:17 without scoring and X somehow still didn’t even get within a possession. Any real team would have run Xavier out of the barn by 40 last night. It’s a condemnation of Butler that they didn’t. Still, the Musketeers never really made it a game. Sean Miller called his timeouts, the team played a walk on for six minutes because there was no one else, and there was essentially just a procession to the inevitable conclusion.
And that may be the most concerning thing that happened. Quincy Olivari looked worse than frustrated last night. Coach Miller said it was Olivari’s defense that got him benched, but Olivari looked despondent at points during the game. He missed one three that left him staring up into the sky like Willem Dafoe in Platoon. On that and other occasions that he missed his obviously disheartened state left him late back down the floor. Whether it was just a bad shooting night in a string of them or something else is going on, Quincy was not himself last night.
And neither was Coach Miller. He got another technical from the pitiful Tony Chiazza and then had to be briefly held back by Dante Jackson and went on the court to further remonstrate with the officials. Xavier was never really back in the game, but they also never really engaged a panic mode to try to scramble back. The press was there off and on, then when it would have taken a minor miracle, they didn’t foul. Miller sort of signaled for it at one point and Djokovic sort of tried to do it, but it felt like the coach was aware the game had gone and was somewhat content to let it go.
Maybe Olivari is worn out from carrying a team that features him as the actual offensive threat. Maybe Sean Miller is exhausted from trying to cobble together a competitive team from the bits and pieces of a roster he’s managed to keep healthy this season. Again, there are six scholarship players and projected contributors that are unavailable for the season. That’s a ludicrous number. Maybe everyone is just run down and tired from fighting a season that derailed in early December and has taken a herculean effort just to keep close to competitive.
There are a lot of reasons that Xavier may have been so poor yesterday. All of them are more or less legitimate. What that leaves, though, is the same kind of feeling floating around like before Xavier took on Cleveland State in the NIT. That’s not a good place to be.