What went right and what went wrong for the Hawks this season
St. Joe’s wrapped up its 2021-2022 campaign with a 11-19 record and a loss to La Salle University in the first round of the Atlantic 10 (A-10) Tournament. Recent days have seen the exodus of the team’s two leading scorers in sophomore guard/forward Jordan Hall and redshirt senior forward Taylor Funk to the NBA Draft and the transfer portal, respectively.
What went well and what didn’t go well for this year’s team? Let’s take a deeper look.
On the glass, St. Joe’s was solid; the team grabbed 2.4 more rebounds than its opponents on average. Graduate transfer forward/center Ejike Obinna ranked fourth in the conference in rebounding, hauling in 7.9 rebounds per game, while Hall and Funk added 6.7 and 6.6 rebounds respectively per contest. No other team in the conference had a trio of players grab at least six rebounds in a game.
The team struggled with taking care of the ball on offense as well as creating turnovers on defense. The team’s difference between steals and turnovers, known as turnover margin, ranked last in the conference at -4.1. This margin contributed to St. Joe’s averaging 4.4 less points off turnovers than its opponents.
Individually, while Hall ranked second in the conference in assists per game at 5.8, he was also second in turnovers at 3.5 per game. His assist to turnover ratio of 1.7 was 12th in the league.
Defensively, the team ranked ninth in the league in opponent field goal percentage and fourth in opponent three-point field goal percentage. Hall led the team in defensive win shares, which measures the number of wins contributed by a player due to his defense, at 1.6. Hall was followed by Funk at 1.3 and Obinna and first year guard Erik Reynolds II with 1.2 each. Hall led the team in steals with 37 in the season, followed by junior guard Cam Brown with 28. As a team, the Hawks ranked 296 out of 350 in the country with 74 total team blocks.
It’s safe to say that expectations were higher entering the season. The team was picked 10th in the A-10 and ended up placing second-to-last in the conference. In six of the Hawks’ 13 losses in the league, they led at halftime.
Moving into the offseason, Head Coach Billy Lange and the coaching staff will look to replace the production of Hall and Funk, who together accounted for 39% of St. Joe’s scoring this season. The team will also lose rotational players in junior guards Dahmir Bishop and Jack Forrest, both of whom elected to enter the transfer portal after the season.
During last year’s offseason, the Hawks were finalists to land Wake Forest University’s Alondes Williams, who blossomed into the Atlantic Coast Conference’s player of the year and Xavier Johnson, a starter for an Indiana University team that made the NCAA Tournament. If the program is able to land a high-caliber transfer, the trajectory of next season changes immensely.
