Another year, another major roster overhaul for Tony Bozzella and the Pirates. Will this one work?
Team: Seton Hall Pirates
2023-24 Record: 17-15, 8-10 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: 7th, one game behind Georgetown, two games in front of a Butler/Providence tie for 8th.
Final 2023-24 Her Hoop Stats Ranking: #71 out of 360 teams
Postseason? A first round win over #10 seeded DePaul turned into a Big East tournament quarterfinal loss to #2 seed Creighton. Seton Hall still had enough juice to get into the WBIT, the secondary tourney that the NCAA ran this past season, but they took a 54-47 road loss to Saint Joseph’s in the first round to end their season.
Key Departures: We can phrase this a couple of different ways. Seton Hall is losing their top three scorers from last season, but two of those departures were expected. Azana Baines (14.7 points/game) and Kae Satterfield (9.2/game) were on their fifth years of eligibility with the Pirates last winter, so their time in South Orange was up one way or another. In between the two of them on the score sheet was Micah Gray, who has taken her 11.9 points per game off to Oklahoma State for her third team in three years after starting her collegiate career off at Texas Southern.
Seton Hall is losing their top four rebounders from last season. Baines (6.0/game) led the team and Satterfield was #3 at 4.1 rebounds per contest. A’Jah Davis was second with 5.0 per game as well as 4.7 points, too. She was always only at SHU for one season after four at Northern Illinois, so no surprise there. Makennah White has bounced from Seton Hall after one year to take her bonus season of eligibility at Missouri State which is the furthest she’s been from home in Pennsylvania for college, as she was at UMass for three seasons previously. She chipped in 3.1 rebounds per game for the Pirates.
We have two more rotation players who didn’t fit into those categories who are gone now as well. Sha’Lynn Hagans was on her fifth year of eligibility last season, and she added 5.0 points and 1.4 rebounds per game while averaging 17.3 minutes in 29 appearance with nine starts. The 5th year thing also explains the loss of Brazil Harvey-Carr, who spent two years at Rhode Island and two at Manhattan before closing out her college time playing 10.5 minutes in 23 appearances with one start for the Pirates. 3.7 points and 1.8 rebounds isn’t a giant hole to fill but it’s still a “most every game” rotation player that’s not here any more.
Key Returners: Seton Hall returns just three rotation players from last season and only one starter. That starter is Amari Wright, who didn’t do much in the way of scoring at 4.6 points per game, but she led the team in assists at 5.3 per night and added 3.0 rebounds and 2.1 steals to the proceedings. She started in all 30 appearances in her fourth season with the Pirates and averaged over 30 minutes per game.
The rotation players are I’Yanna Lops and Savannah Catalon. Lops is the only woman who played in all 32 games a year ago, and somehow she only started seven times. This will actually be her sixth year of college coming up as she had a six game run at Cal State Bakersfield in 2019-20 before heading to St. Bonaventure for the next three seasons. I’m not sure what the scenario is where she’s approved to be back for one more run, but it means Seton Hall keeps her 3.6 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 14.0 minutes per game in the rotation. Catalon was a freshman for Seton Hall a year ago, and had a very nice first collegiate year. 7.4 points, 2.2 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 1.5 steals while appearing in 31 games and starting three times is a kind of thing you’d take from most freshmen in college basketball.
Key Additions: As you would expect, there’s a lot of them.
Seton Hall is bolstering their roster with six transfers to go along with three freshmen. Blue Star only mentions two of the freshmen, but we do have to note that 5’7” guard Jada Eads is ranked #125 in the country by them. I’m going to guess that the lack of mention of Baylor Franz, a 5’6” guard from Oklahoma, is more about SHU signing her in late April of this year than anything else, but Blue Star didn’t note her at all, either.
Adding six transfers sounds like it could be a good thing, but most of them have never been counted on as a major producer at their previous stops. This will presumably be the final college season for Kaydan Lawson (6’0” guard/forward) and Faith Masonius (6’1” forward) as this is their fifth and sixth seasons respectively as Masonius had a six game junior season and so she has an extra extra season due to a medical redshirt. Last year was a pretty typical year for Lawson at Virginia where she averaged less than 11 minutes a game and added 2.1 points and 2.2 rebounds per game. Masonius was more of a core player at Maryland for her whole career, and she wrapped up last season with 16 starts in 33 games played. She was averaging over 24 minutes per game, but just 6.6 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 2.5 assists. By the way: Neither woman is a long range threat, with both at 25% or lower last season.
I’m not sure if this will be Ramani Parker’s only season at Seton Hall as it is her fifth in college hoops…. but she had a season ending injury after just two contests last year with Mississippi State. This year might be her fourth playing year, and a medical redshirt could bring her back in 2025-26 as well, but we’ll see. As a junior, the 6’4” forward averaged 4.8 points and 3.9 rebounds in 15.3 minutes per game. The Bulldogs didn’t ask her shoot it much, but she did drain nearly 40% of her attempts in 2022-23.
I’m also not sure about Messiah Hunter’s eligibility situation as she was at West Virginia for three years but played in just one game as a freshman. She appeared in 21 games last year, saw less than seven minutes of run per night, and added 1.6 points and 1.3 rebounds. ASIDE: The 6’2” forward from Virginia might have the most fascinating name in the entire league. MESSIAH HUNTER playing in the very Catholic Big East? That’s fun.
That brings us to Nicole Melious and Savanna Jones, both of whom bring the “But does it translate to the Big East?” question with them. Melious, a 5’8” guard from Staten Island, is coming a little bit closer to home after one year at La Salle, but she had a pretty dang good one year. 29 starts in 30 appearances, 29 minutes a night, just under 11 points and 3 rebounds per game, 34% from long range. If she can make that work in the Big East, she’ll be a big contributor for the Pirates. Same goes for Jones, who makes her way to South Orange after averaging 13.3 points, 7.7 rebounds, and 1.9 assists as a freshman last year. The catch? The 6’2” forward from Minnesota did it for North Dakota College Of Science, which is a junior college institution.
Coach: Tony Bozzella, entering his 25th season as a Division 1 head coach and 12th season at Seton Hall. He has a record of 187-141 with the Pirates, 373-355 in Division 1, and 493-459 as a collegiate head coach.
Outlook: I’m not going to go so far as to say that Tony Bozzella is in any kind of danger of losing his job unless Seton Hall wins this season. He’s had two losing seasons in 11 campaigns in South Orange, and none in the last five years. He produces competitive basketball teams year in and year out, and what more can you really ask for?
The answer to that question might be “anything resembling continuity.” Last year, Bozzella and his staff relied heavily on transfers coming in to fill the roster and, one way or another, on players who were on their final season of eligibility. Last year, that meant Seton Hall had five returning rotation players to depend on. The roster combinations that they had in 2023-24 sent them to a 7th place finish in the Big East. Winning record over all yes, three games over before they lost their last two “lose-and-go-home” games in fact, but that’s still bottom half of the Big East.
Heading into next year, it’s just three returning rotation players. Sure, you can argue that last year’s rotation wasn’t good enough to be a top half of the league team or enough to compete for an NCAA tournament bid, and so turning it over isn’t the worst thing in the world. The flip side of that is the transfers we talked about coming in last year, for the most part, had a history of doing something at their previous schools. We also have to point out that two of those transfers from last year are up top in the Key Departures section, but in the “they still had eligibility left to use” department, not the “this is the last ride” department. Even what you would think would be long-term solutions from the transfer portal are heading back out the door one year later.
This year’s group of transfers mostly don’t have a history of performing well with their previous teams. They might make a lot of good plays at the right time and fit in to the system and so on….. but other than Amari Wright and her passing, there’s no one on this roster that you look at and say “yep, I can see who the top dog in this rotation is going to be.” To make matters worse, Wright’s assists are obviously dependent on the players around her making shots, and boy, let me tell you what, there are not a lot of proven shot makers on this roster right now.
And so, this is the part of the show where I bring up the point that I made a year ago as well: Tony Bozzella hasn’t coached an NCAA tournament team since 2016. Going to the secondary tournament (used to be the WNIT, now it’s the WBIT after this past season) in five of the past six seasons when it’s been contested proves you’re doing something right…. but it’s starting to prove that you’re not doing enough things right, too.
Look, maybe someone jumps out as a top dog, and maybe the pieces fit together in a way that I can’t see them fitting together based on what they’re done in the past, and maybe Seton Hall takes advantage of questions amongst the NCAA tournament contenders not named UConn and Creighton from last year, and maybe they have themselves a nice successful season. Maybe I spend most of next year’s check-in saying “Well, yet once again, a paid professional basketball coach proves themselves to be much smarter than me.”
Or maybe it never quite comes together for the Pirates and it’s an eighth straight season without an NCAA tournament for Bozzella and Seton Hall.