Team Preview: Saint Mary's

The 2012-13 St. Mary’s Gaels are hoping to defend their regular season and WCC championship titles this year, but will have to replace the stalwart Rob Jones with a committee of transfers and intriguing pieces. With Matthew Dellavedova and Randy Bennett, this team would compete for a WCC crown regardless of the supporting cast, but SMC has a lot of useful parts to go along with Dellavedova, and Bennett always seems to create lineups that are consistently solid defensively and nuanced offensively. They aren't afraid of Gonzaga, and they have the talent and skill to repeat. Let’s start with what they've lost and what they've gained.

Rob Jones (#22, left), Clint Steindl (#11, center), and Stephen Holt (#14, right) celebrate their WCC tourney win. Steindl and Jones graduated last year.

What they Lose:

This list starts and ends with Rob Jones. 20 Double-doubles last year, averaged 10.8 rebounds/game (7^th nationally) (!), 15.0 points/game, plus 1.6 steals/game. Jones was listed at 6’ 6” 240 lbs, but I would have guessed that he weighed somewhere around 260. At the very least, he played like it. He was a consistent inside/outside threat who gave Randy Bennett a great second option to Dellavedova. Jones was strong enough to pose problems for Elias Harris in the post, and athletic enough to chase him around the perimeter (a rare combination, especially in the WCC). I don’t know if anyone else noticed this, but from the first time they matched up, Jones and Harris clearly hated each other for one reason or another. Maybe some creative trash talk was tossed around, but every game would go through the same cycle (if you watched them specifically):

• Relatively normal style of play for a couple minutes (maybe a little hasty)
• Someone would post up a little aggressively/throw an elbow around
• The rest of the game would involve both guys sprinting around, shoving each other
• After one made a big basket or a stop, the other would go out of their way to call for the ball and drive right through their counterpart
• Whoever managed to control their aggression best would have the better individual game

I kind of enjoyed their personal rivalry! Elias has been accused of coasting through games or not being passionate before (something I don’t think is true), but I always knew he was going to get after it against SMC.

Another player that the Gaels have lost is Clint Steindl. He averaged 8 pints and about 3 boards per game on the wing, giving Randy Bennett a long, relatively quick wing to bother shooters on the perimeter. Steindl always seemed to hit big threes for the Gaels (often after the defense collapsed on Dellavedova, Jones, or Waldow) and having a solid senior bench player is a luxury not all teams have. Knowing exactly what you’ll get out of a bench player is the kind of thing that casual fans assume is a given, but for a coach, it allows you to play the Xs and Os game at a much higher level. How many times did we see Mark Few mess with his lineups the last few years as he tried to figure out exactly what Landry Edi or Micah Downs or Ryan Spangler was going to give him?

Dellavedova, doing his thing.

What they bring back:

A whole bunch. Dellavedova will keep this team competitive, and a year in the weight room for Brad Waldow might make him a more powerful force down low. Stephen Holt and Jordan Page give the Gaels an explosive backcourt with bench depth provided by James Walker III, a JuCo transfer with a diverse offensive skill set. Down low, Matt Hodgson (another Aussie, this one is a shot blocker), Mitchell Young and Kyle Rowley give the Gaels a good mix of skill and brawn. Coupled with the drive and kick skill of Dellavedova, this group should be able to handle the front line of other teams on defense while scoring off pick and rolls and manufacturing the occasional back-to-the-basket shot. The one thing they are missing is a true offensive presence down low, and while that may hurt their chances in March, it shouldn’t be a huge issue until then.

While they lose a lot of scoring and rebounding without Jones and Steindl, they will make up for it with a committee of options with specific skills. In the frontcourt, Waldow is a bruiser, Hodgson is a shot blocker, and Rowley and Young are the “blue-collar” types. The backcourt is led by the always stellar Dellavedova, a lock-down defender in Holt, an explosive playmaker (who occasionally disappears) in Page, and a wild-card in Walker III.

Make no mistake: this team is good. If you’re reading Zagaholic, you aren’t here for a preview that bashes SMC and predicts a terrible season for them. That said, as someone who actively dislikes the Gaels, every year I predict that they will falter after the loss of a key piece (Patty Mills, Omar Samhan, Mickey McConnell, and now Rob Jones) but every year they seem to hold steady, or improve. They will win at least 20 games this year, and they will be in the running for a regular season/WCC title until the very last possession.

Schedule:

Here is a nice little chart thingy with the SMC schedule. I made one on my own (I know I’m incredible) that includes my predictions for each game.

Date	Opponent	Predicted Result
11/10	Sonoma State	W
11/15	@ Utah State	W
11/18	Eastern Washington	W
11/22	Drexel (first game in DirectTV classic)	W
11/23	TBA (DirectTV classic)	?
11/25	TBA (DirectTV classic)	?
12/1	Cal Poly	W
12/5	@ Drake	W
12/11	Jackson State	W
12/19	Pacific	W
12/22	@ Northern Iowa	W
12/27	Rhode Island	W
12/30	Yale	W
12/31	Harvard	W
1/5	LMU	W
1/10	@ Gonzaga	L
1/12	USF	W
1/16	@ BYU	L
1/19	@ Portland	W
1/24	USD	W
1/26	Pepperdine	W
1/30	@ USF	W
2/2	Portland	W
2/7	@ Santa Clara	W
2/9	@ USD	W
2/14	Gonzaga	W
2/16	@ LMU	W
2/21	BYU	W
2/23	ESPN Bracketbusters game	?
2/27	@ Pepperdine	W
3/2	Santa Clara	W
3/6	WCC Championships begin	?

If you've been counting, that’s 25 wins and 2 losses, not counting the WCC tournament, the ESPN bracketbusters game (ESPN figures the opponent out later on), or the 2^nd and 3^rd rounds of the DirectTV classic. At the same time, this schedule is paper thin. They get Harvard at home, the night after they play Yale, and have their marquee non-conference road matchup with… Northern Iowa? A solid team, to be sure, but they shouldn't be one of your most difficult non-conference games. I only struggled with the results of a few games: the Northern Iowa one, Utah State, on the road at USF, Harvard, and the home game against Gonzaga. I think Utah State will come out and punch the Gaels in the mouth, and it is the first road game for a team figuring out their rotations. Who knows? Crazier things have happened. Northern Iowa got beat pretty handily by the Gaels last year, but that can both give UNI motivation and let SMC get complacent. USF has beaten us at home the past three years (!) but the Gaels have handled them pretty well. That said, they do always (always) have on unexpected loss late in their WCC slate. I’m not sure who it will be, though maybe BYU pulls of a stunner on the road. Harvard had a great team last year, and I was all ready to put them down as an upset loss, but apparently an academic cheating scandal will cost them a couple key players (link here). Even with the back to back, they should be fine. Finally, the home win against Gonzaga was tough to write down, but these past few years every game with SMC has been a toss-up, meaning that home court advantage is usually enough to put the home team over the top. Hopefully, I’m wrong on this one.

Coach Randy Bennett trying to figure out how to pronounce "Levesque"

In conclusion, the Saint Mary’s Gaels will be in the WCC title race all the way to the end. They will find a way to replace Rob Jones’ production with more depth and maybe a faster pace, though they may suffer on defense. The three wild cards for their season are Matt Hodgson’s role as a shot blocker, James Walker III’s adjustment to the DI game, and whatever comes out of the NCAA investigation currently underway (link here). We'll have to see how those turn out, as the suspension of a couple players due to an investigation could put a damper on the growth of this SMC squad. Either way, we'll be seeing a lot of this team.