Big 5 notebook: St. Joseph’s turnaround will get a real test from a pesky La Salle team

It was easy to imagine the 2025-26 St. Joseph’s season as being a lost one on Jan. 3, after the Hawks went six minutes without a made basket in crunch time and blew an 11-point second half lead to Davidson to fall to 8-7 overall and 0-2 in the Atlantic 10.

In fairness, that’s what it had been to date. This wasn’t glass-half-empty thinking. Consider what had transpired in the four previous months. Former coach Billy Lange abruptly left in September, and St. Joe’s turned to Steve Donahue, whom Lange had hired as associate head coach after Donahue was fired by Penn.

Who would stay? Who would leave? It was a little late for the players to reasonably find somewhere else to go. Lange had built a roster capable of competing in the upper half of the A-10, but then came a 2-3 start. By mid-December, leading scorer Deuce Jones, a La Salle transfer, was off the team.

The Hawks went 3-for-22 from three-point range in that Davidson loss. By that point, only one of their eight victories had come against a team ranked inside the KenPom top 200, and even in that one they needed a frantic comeback and a wild shot from Jones before the buzzer to beat Temple. Two of the eight wins were against Division III teams.

St. Joe’s has won five of six since then. What changed? The shots are falling more consistently, which always helps, and there’s more of a sense of togetherness when you watch the Hawks than in games earlier in the season.

But never question the power of a meeting. The Hawks had one in the aftermath of that Davidson loss in Donahue’s office, where six players entered with change in mind.

“When we looked at ourselves in the mirror, we saw something that we didn’t like,” said senior guard Derek Simpson, who scored a season-low six points in that Davidson loss but has scored 19.2 points per game in the six since.

“We got our feelings out,” Simpson said. “We were able to tell each other how we felt.”

St. Joe’s (13-8, 5-3) has been nearly perfect since. The only blemish came against a Virginia Commonwealth team rated 46th at KenPom (St. Joe’s is 157th), and the Hawks could have won that game. They got 20 points from Jaiden Glover-Toscano to help knock off Dayton one game later, and the St. John’s transfer is starting to show more flashes of why he was a high-major prospect in the first place. He had the highlight of the night Tuesday when he threw down a one-handed slam, one of the Hawks’ 12 dunks in a blowout win over lowly Loyola-Chicago.

Next on the schedule for St. Joe’s is a game Saturday against its crosstown rival, La Salle, that looks a lot more interesting now than it did a few weeks ago.

That’s because the best win of the young Darris Nichols era in Olney happened last week when the Explorers started Dayton off on its Philadelphia trip from hell by jumping out to a 33-8 lead and holding on for dear life in a 67-64 victory.

That came on the heels of a win over St. Bonaventure.

The Explorers (7-14, 3-5), who are much healthier now than they were earlier in the season, lost Wednesday night at Fordham, but they’ve hung in against some of the A-10’s elite and play a style that won’t be fun to go against in the conference tournament.

Or if you’re a St. Joe’s team looking to keep the train on the tracks Saturday.

» READ MORE: Will Villanova end its NCAA Tournament drought? Here’s what the numbers — and Joe Lunardi — say.

Temple announced more than 2,600 attendees at its Wednesday night home game vs. Charlotte, but it didn’t take a census veteran to realize that number was way overinflated. Half of that number might have been generous. Some students showed up, but many of them were gone after the iPad giveaway was doled out.

The Owls probably deserve a little more support. That aforementioned heartbreaker vs. St. Joe’s at the Big 5 Classic was followed by a seven-game winning streak. Then, during the week when assistant coach Bill Courtney died suddenly, Temple nearly beat two of the best teams in the American Athletic Conference.

The Owls should have closed out a win over Charlotte on Wednesday, despite being without key starter Gavin Griffiths. They led by nine with six minutes left before losing in overtime. But they’re 5-3 in conference play (13-8 overall) and just one game back of first place.

They host a South Florida team on Saturday night that is 6-2 and in a four-way tie for first (8 p.m., ESPN2). It’s White Out night at the Liacouras Center.

Philadelphia is a lot worse off without Dan McQuade, who died of cancer at 43 years old this week. McQuade, the son of longtime Daily News assistant sports editor Drew McQuade, was a singular writer who wrote for various publications — Defector, Deadspin, and Philadelphia Magazine among them — with flair and fun and with more curiosity than most.

Dan wrote about a lot of things, but he sure loved Philly basketball, and wrote about it often, like when he went to the Catholic League final in 2023 and implored people in a Defector article to go out and see more basketball games in person. Or when he wrote about attending a La Salle home game and witnessing an economic professor light the silly smoke machine at Gola Arena. Or when he went to a Big 5 doubleheader at the Palestra, where he attended many games as a former Penn student and sports writer, and wrote a compelling case for little kids playing basketball being the best version of the halftime show.

Or when he turned La Salle hiring former Penn and Temple coach Fran Dunphy into a human story about a writer who found his footing covering hoops at Penn and a coach who made that college-age writer feel accepted among his professional peers.

Rest in peace, Dan.