Saturday, December 3rd, William and Mary men’s basketball welcomed long-lost rival Richmond to Kaplan Arena for the first time in nine years. The game played out in a familiar fashion to many Tribe contests this season – a hot offense in the first half staking out W&M to a lead, before holding on for dear life in the second as a scoring drought threatened to undo all their positive momentum. That evening, the Tribe somehow escaped with the win over the Spiders. This year’s UofR team isn’t last year’s tournament team, but it was hard to view it as anything but progress.
It’s exactly two months later, but it feels like it might as well have been another nine years. Any signs of progress have seemingly evaporated, and with seven games remaining the Tribe looks destined for a quick exit in DC yet again.
That isn’t to say this year’s Tribe isn’t better than last season’s team – they undoubtedly are. With another win W&M will officially double the total number of victories from the dreadful ‘21-22 squad. But a 21-place jump in KenPom ranking is not exactly worthy of celebration when you’re still discussing it in terms of how close they are to the very bottom of Division I basketball.
What’s especially frustrating is that this season was an opportunity to begin a rise back out of the basement of the CAA. Sure, the very top of the league is strong this year – Charleston, Hofstra, Towson, and UNCW make up a pretty intimidating top tier. But there’s no reason the Tribe couldn’t have been in that second group with teams like Drexel and North Carolina A&T.
One reason for that was the unbalanced schedule – with the entrance of four new schools this season, the CAA is no longer playing a true round-robin schedule. W&M was the beneficiary of that, avoiding a second game with Charleston and Hofstra while picking up two opportunities to beat up on the absolute dregs of the league in Elon, Stony Brook and Hampton.
Hampton, a team that entered last night at 5-17, including just 2-8 in the conference. A team that the Tribe beat earlier in the season 81-65, an easy win for a W&M squad that has not picked up many easy wins in the last three seasons. It was a golden opportunity to get back on track after losing 4 of 5, three of those defeats coming by 19 or more.
In the pattern we saw that Saturday in early December – and countless times since then – the Tribe rode hot shooting and stretches of solid play on both ends of the court to a 34-27 halftime lead. They almost immediately squandered it, going scoreless for the first four minutes of the second frame and putting up just 23 points total in the half. Hampton punctuated the 62-57 victory with a humiliating off-the-backboard fastbreak dunk.
I wish I could say that this was a masterful defensive performance by Hampton to turn the tide of the game, but we’ve seen this movie before. Live ball turnovers by W&M led to easy Pirates buckets, and when they didn’t turn it over, poor offensive execution meant plenty of contested shots at the end of the shot clock. It wasn’t a game Hampton took by force; the Tribe seemed content to let it slip away.
After this loss in particular, Tribe basketball feels directionless. W&M’s best player, and even more so during the recent run of games, is a graduate student that will not be returning next year in Anders Nelson. Its preseason all-CAA pick center, Ben Wight, has regressed on both ends of the court. Tyler Rice, its starting point guard at the beginning of the season, is no longer seeing the floor except in mop-up duty.
It feels like, in one way or another, the Tribe needs a fresh start. I’m a believer in process over results, but the results have to dictate the process to some extent. The path back to contending consistently in the Colonial will not come from the status quo.
W&M has seven games to turn things around and change the narrative. It starts on Saturday against a UNCW team it beat earlier this season. It’s the Gold Rush game, a weekend that used to signify the excitement and energy surrounding basketball at Kaplan Arena. But this year, with disappointment on court and apathy in the community, it feels more gray than gold.