Prudential Center—The Pirates started the game with a lot of energy but it was channeled in the wrong place for the first five minutes of the game. After the first media timeout coach Shaheen Holloway settled his troops down and they started to play Seton Hall type of basketball.
Al-Amir Dawes scored 23 points and Kadary Richmond chipped in 21 to lead the Seton Hall Pirates (10-5) in a 78-75 win over No. 7 Marquette (11-4) Saturday afternoon at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey in front of announced crowd 10,481.
The Golden Eagles started out fast and at the 12:46 mark, Marquette was up by 10 (23-13) making the Pirates turn the ball over in the paint, they sped up Seton Hall and forced them to take bad shots early in the game. The Hall turned the ball over 12 times in the half.
The Golden Eagles lead the all-time series with Seton Hall, 23-14 with all but one of the contests coming after MU joined the Big East Conference in 2005-06.
The Pirates are 82-63 all-time against Big East competition at the Rock.
“Marquette is a very good team, very well-coached, great players,” Holloway said. “We came in today, and I think the crowd played a big part so I want to thank those guys.”
At the 5:04 mark the Hall upped the their lead to five 35-30. Topped off by a long three by Tre Davis from the top of the key.
The Pirates settled down on defense and started to cut off the back door penetration that took Marquette out of sequence on offense. Dawes was the catalyst in the first half scouring 15 points in that frame, helped the Hall to secure a three points advantage 42-39 going into the locker room.
Seton Hall shot 50.0% (15-30) from the field and 41.7% (1-3) from beyond. Dylan Addae-Wusu and Richmond chipped in 7 points to end the first half.
In the second half, Seton Hall picked it up offensively, Dawes and Richmond killed Marquette with their dribble drive penetration and shots started to fall for the Pirates. At the 15:13 mark Seton Hall was up by 10 (54-44) and the Pirates were going for blood.
A 10-0 spurt with back-to-back fast break rim rockers by Richmond and Dre Davis push the Pirates to its largest lead of the contest with 2:26 to go, 76-66, Marquette wouldn’t go down without fight. Despite costly ball handling miscues in the backcourt which made it a one-point contest with 40 ticks on the clock, Davis scored a huge basket on the left wing, the Pirates’ defense forced a turnover on the other end to close it out.
Oso Ighodaro scored 22 points for the Golden Eagles, David Joplin chipped in 15 in the loss.
“I think, first of all, it’s hard to win on the road and teams are going to be very, very motivated on their end to win the game,” MU head coach Shaka Smart said. “And I think we’ve run into that in those games.
“We try to focus on ourselves. We don’t really control the other team. We spent some time as a group re-setting our road mindset coming into today. I thought in some ways our guys carried that over and in some ways we didn’t.”
Marquette scored 32 points on the Hall 22 turnovers for the game. Seton Hall outrebounded the Golden Eagles 43-25 for the contest.
Up Next:
Seton Hall will play Georgetown away on Jan 9th for a 6:30 PM start time on FS1.
Marquette will be home to play Butler on Jan 10th for a 5:00 PM start time on CBSSN.
