St. Joe’s has another Big 5 Classic championship but a long season ahead to keep ‘attacking’

“It’s hard, and you have expectations, and you know people want to beat you,” Lange said.

St. Joseph's celebrates after defeating La Salle in the championship game in the Big 5 Classic. The Hawks repeated as champions.Read moreCharles Fox / Staff Photographer

Published Dec. 8, 2024, 7:05 a.m. ET

Billy Lange doesn’t like fishing. It takes too much time and there are so many other things to do. But Erik Reynolds II, he likes to fish. The St. Joseph’s basketball star grew up outside of Washington in Temple Hills, Md., where Henson Creek flows through and eventually drains into the Potomac River. Reynolds will sit on a boat for eight hours and catch one fish, and his coach can’t understand the appeal.

How did we get here?

It was more than a half hour after St. Joseph’s topped La Salle, 82-68, and won its second consecutive Big 5 Classic championship at the Wells Fargo Center, and Lange, in a new outfit after his players doused him with water, was asked how the attacking mentality he had drilled into his team all week had played out with the two players on the podium with him wearing the championship T-shirts — Reynolds, who had a game-high 24 points, and Xzayvier Brown, who had 21 points, six assists, and four steals.

Lange said he told Reynolds to “read his resumé.” Reynolds is a fisher, and Lange just wants him “to keep his line in the water when he’s playing. Just keep fishing.”

And Brown?

“This guy, he’s an amazing player that is only a sophomore,” Lange said of the reigning Atlantic 10 rookie of the year. “He’s only a sophomore. He’s playing in the oldest era in the history of college basketball. He’s a sophomore, and he’s allowed to get better, and he’s allowed to make mistakes. We had a word at the beginning of the year, adaptable. I thought he was adaptable tonight.

“We’ve got great guards,” Lange continued, getting a bit closer to the point of it all. “We need them to play well. We know that. But it’s not all on them. I care way more about the mentality. I thought they attacked great tonight.”

Attack was the word of the week on Hawk Hill.

“I was very clear to these guys on Thursday that this was not about back-to-back,” Lange said. “It’s about attacking. That’s what it’s about. That was last year’s team’s shared experience. And when you go into that mindset you get so tense, and the better your team is the more vulnerable you are to be afraid to go after something.”

Lange has been adamant that comparing things year over year is unfair and he was again late Saturday night. The Hawks do have eight new players, as Lange pointed out, but only three of them saw serious minutes during a win that was rarely close after St. Joe’s scored 17 of the first 25 out of halftime.

Perhaps Lange is guarding against what he’s already seen, the tension he mentioned.

“It’s an adjustment that we all have to make in our program,” he said. “We’re being hunted more than we are and I think that creates tension and there’s no flow.

“It’s hard, and you have expectations, and you know people want to beat you. How do you create that mentality? It’s just one word: Attack.”

He has the team, and the guards, to be that type of team. The Brown-Reynolds guard combination is an elite A-10 backcourt. Junior wing Rasheer Fleming has NBA upside. Rutgers transfer Derek Simpson is a solid two-way player. Justice Ajogbor, the center who transferred in from Harvard, is super effective when he’s in the right spots, and he’s there a little more frequently. The Hawks aren’t short of key role contributors, either.

The ceiling of this group has been well publicized, even if Lange has tried his best to temper expectations and comparisons to things in the past. But they aren’t unfair or irrational expectations. When you have players good enough to win a league title, and good enough to possibly be in the at-large NCAA Tournament conversation, that’s the bar.

A six-point home loss to Central Connecticut State could have provided an inflection point, and it may a few months from now when resumés are being compared, but it didn’t change the way Lange coached or the things he preached. This is a guy who routinely calls himself boring. The Hawks went back to practice and tried to continue to get better. Four nights later, they beat Villanova. Then they rolled Penn, outlasted Texas Tech, and hung with Texas.

St. Joe’s lost to Princeton earlier last week in the lead-up to the Big 5 Classic. A 9-for-32 performance from three-point range will do that.

Princeton may win the Ivy League, and while it’s a win that would probably help St. Joe’s down the road, it’s not a killer loss. The nonconference season is nearing its end. The Hawks are 6-3 with one bad loss and, after winning Saturday, were at No. 93 nationally according to KenPom metrics.

“We’re here,” Lange said. “The season is really a myth. It’s only a season after it’s over. So it’s about now. That’s what it’s about. I try not to — and I’m not good at it, I’m working and it and I got to get better at it — judge where we’re at. We’re allowed to lose. Other teams are allowed to play good games. That doesn’t mean anything. This win won’t mean anything when we wake up tomorrow. I’m not big on connecting this to that.

“If I acted any different after a win and a loss in terms of the teaching and the development and the process of the next day, he would think I had a frontal lobotomy,” Lange continued, gesturing toward Reynolds. “He’s been here three years. He knows what to expect.”

The Hawks have Charleston at home Tuesday, and 21 more games after that.

“Whatever unfolds at the end, we’ll be ready for it,” Lange said.

For now, a line is cast.