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Crew: Pirates of Seton Hall
2021-22 review: 24-13, 12-8 Great East
Arrival Big East 2021-22: Sixth, one game behind Marquette but well ahead of St. John’s.
Her Hoop 2021-22 Final Stats Rankings: #85 out of 356 teams.
Post-season: The Pirates enjoyed playoff success. They reached the semi-finals of the Big East Tournament after upsetting Creighton in the quarter-finals before being eliminated by Villanova. Their profile was bright enough to get them into the WNIT, and they won three home games and a pair of road games to reach the WNIT title match. They ran out of steam there, however, as South Dakota State took the 82-50 win at Brookings.
Key departures: When the roster starts with your #3 goalscorer, things aren’t too bad for you. In this case it is Andra Espinoza Hunter, who had 15.0 points per game for the Pirates last season. The 5’11” fullback/forward also added 5.4 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game, and she was a quality 36% three-point shooter while leading the team in long attempts. distance.
Things are starting to bend into bad territory with the No.4 goalscorer mya jackson choose to go out after his freshman year. She’s now in Cincinnati, which is a bit closer to home, and she’s taking 9.0 points, 2.9 rebounds and 1.3 assists per game. Jackson is the last person on the stat sheet to average more than five points per game for the Pirates last year.
It is also necessary to recognize the departures of Katie Armstrong and Dean curtessia. Armstrong played in all but one game for the Pirates last year and started 10 times before finishing averaging just over 15 minutes a night. His numbers of 2.5 points and 2.1 rebounds aren’t much to mention, but it’s still a rotational point that needs to be considered. Same with Dean, who has averaged 11.9 minutes per game off the bench in 30 appearances. She added just 4.2 points and 2.5 rebounds to the proceedings, but again: steady rotational contributions. Armstrong was already a graduate student for SHU, while Dean transferred to Wichita State.
Key returners: With four notable contributors gone, that leaves Seton Hall with four spinning pieces returning from last year. As you’ve probably already figured out, they fire their top two scorers. top scorer, Lauren Park Lane, was also the Big East’s assists leader last season with just over seven assists per game. Combine that with his scoring rate of 18.3/game and the LPL were responsible for at least 32 of Seton Hall’s 69.3 points per game last season. Considering she’s only 5’3″, her 2.9 rebounds per night are quite a contribution.
#2 on the stat sheet was Sydney cooks. The Wisconsin native returns for one more round this season after spending two active seasons at Michigan State and one at Mississippi State before arriving at South Orange. She was responsible for 15.9 points and a team-high 7.9 rebounds per game last season, and she also added just over one assist and one block per game. No matter how you slice it, firing your top two scorers who double your assists and rebounds is a great way to start your next season.
Mya Bembry started more often than not last year, 29 times in 36 appearances, and had 4.3 points and a very healthy 6.2 rebounds per game. The only other returning rotation player is Amari Wright, who played 28 games but averaged just 11.4 minutes per night. 2.0 points and 1.4 rebounds per game isn’t much, but the coaching staff was clearly dedicated to putting her down every time.
Key additions: Buckle up, because we’re going to be here for a minute. It shouldn’t surprise you, because you can’t really play basketball with just four women all season long. We’ll very quickly point out that Shailyn Pinkney, a 5’10” forward from Connecticut, is the only freshman on the list after picking up the 2021 statewide Gatorade Player of the Year trophy. Freshman this year is probably a bad thing for Future Seton Hall, but we’ll get to that eventually.
That said, we move on to talk about the SIX transfers to the Seton Hall list. Only one of them is a COVID bonus year grad student, and that’s Alexia Allesch, which also happens to be the most interesting transfer on the list. This is his second stint with the Pirates after starting at UMass and then moving to App State for last season. She was great for the Mountaineers, picking up 13.5 points and 9.7 rebounds per game. That’s far better than any of his previous three college hoops seasons, although Allesch has started all of his 18 appearances for SHU in 2020-21.
The second most interesting transfer on the list is Kae Satterfield. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s for good reason, as the 6’0” full-back/forward has spent the past two seasons at Xavier. She was one of two players fired from the team before the end of the season by head coach Melanie Moore (Nia Clark of Marquette is the other), and she was very good before that happened. Satterfield had 11.0 points, 7.2 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game last year for the Musketeers. It’s still a new thing for players to be able to transfer to the Big East, so the fact that Satterfield can post numbers like that against Big East competition is definitely worth noting here.
There are still four transfers to discuss! Three of them have already played three years of college basketball, but none of them are particularly notable in terms of contributions elsewhere. Sha’lynn Hagansa 5’6″ guard, was a part-time starter for Carolyn Kieger at Penn State the past three seasons, averaging five to seven points while playing more than halfway through the game. Jala Jordan, a 6-foot-2 forward, started her college career in West Virginia before moving to Auburn the past two years. I think we could categorize her as an occasional starter for the Tigers, but she only averaged about 16 minutes per game over the two seasons and never more than eight points or four rebounds per game. To finish, Azana Bainesa 6’1″ fullback/forward, hails from New Jersey but has spent the past three years playing in the ACC. Year #1 was at Duke, where she played 29 games and started some four as a freshman The next two were both at Virginia Tech, where she started most of the time for the Hokies Baines has shown a propensity for bringing in rebounds, especially last season at six per game, but she never did much in the goalscoring department at Blacksburg.
The final transfer on the list is Allie Palmieri, and I’m only mentioning her here because of her complete lack of impact at Boston College. The 5’10” Connecticut guard has played just nine games in two seasons. Part of the reason is that she joined the team midway through the 2020-21 season after finishing high school early and averaging more than 10 minutes per game. Palmieri then played sparingly in BC’s first two games last season and opted to trade at that time. Yeah, I can’t imagine why Connecticut’s 2020 Gatorade Player of the Year and a top 100 prospect would want to leave after that.
Coach: Tony Bozzella, enters his 23rd season as head coach in Division 1 and 10th season at Seton Hall. He is 151-112 with the Pirates, 337-326 in Division 1 and 457-430 as a collegiate head coach.
Outlook: Weird but probably good, and in the long run, maybe weird but probably bad!
Look, I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how competitive Seton Hall will be next season. They have Lauren Park-Lane and Sidney Cooks to carry the heavyweights, and heck, throw Mya Bembry on that list as well. The addition of Kae Satterfield gives them a fourth player with plenty of experience against Big East foes, and at the very least Alexia Allesch can help guide any new faces to understand exactly what Tony Bozzella is up to. If it can look more like App State Alexia, that’s even better.
There’s a little too much depth to the roster for me to be comfortable saying Seton Hall can build on their WNIT title match appearance and turn into an NCAA tournament team. After all, last year’s team was further from an NCAA bid than Marquette and the Golden Eagles were no close. Between the loss of depth on the roster and way too many new faces that should do something about it, I can’t support the Pirates as a Field of 68 team.
But it is possible! That’s kind of the benefit of transfers that Bozzella brought in: none of them were stars anywhere else – okay, maybe Kae Satterfield, but Xavier was bad too, so that’s a wash – so it’s not like the Pirates staff are going to have to figure out how to massage this list with LPL and the cooks who expect to be the leaders. Everybody can just pitch in wherever they can carve out a niche for themselves, and if everything works out great, then yeah, the ceiling here is probably an NCAA tournament team.
It would be really nice if someone figured out how to shoot threes, by the way. Mya Jackson and Andra Espinoza-Hunter were the second and third most reliable shooters on the list last season behind Park-Lane…..and this trio were the only ones who should have shot long range. (NEXT TO: Sidney Cooks, please pick up the blue and white courtesy phone, we need to talk about why you’re shooting three triples a game at just 27.5%.) At a glance, none of the newcomers stand out as a reliable three-point shooter, as you’ll notice, I didn’t mention that stat in any of their quick blurbs above. Maybe it’s a ‘role on the team’ situation where they weren’t asked to shoot…but also here in the year of Our Lord Steph Curry 2022 it’s pretty remarkable if you don’t you’re not a passable shooter, especially as a guard.
Let’s talk about that long-term note I teased at the top of the section. I mean it when I elaborate Seton Hall’s current roster balance, at least as listed on their roster page:
Freshmen: 1
Second year: 0
Junior: 2
Seniors: 8
Graduate students: 2
I may not be a smart man, but I recognize a problem when I see it. That may not be an immediate future issue for the Pirates, as I believe those eight seniors still have an extra year of COVID eligibility at their disposal. Maybe it’s a 2024-25 problem instead of a “they’re totally watered next year” problem. However, at some point in the next two years, Seton Hall loses those 10 women…..and there’s just no depth waiting for them to take the reins…and for at least two of these 10 , that “some point” is already next spring. Can Bozzella generate long-term success from a constant parade of incoming transfers? Is that the plan? It sounds dicey, but opening the doors to anyone from around South Orange to come home and play for the Pirates isn’t the worst way to live either.
