Shortly after four LIU-Brooklyn players were charged with assault in a dorm-room brawl in September, junior guard Jason Brickman turned to head coach Jack Perri and asked the obvious question.
“Are we even going to have a team to field this year?” Brickman inquired. “Where do we go from here, coach?”
It was a logical inquiry considering the four LIU players — C.J. Garner, Julian Boyd, Troy Joseph and Jamal Olasewere — were booted out of school and two others — Booker Hucks and Kenny Onyechi — were down with injuries.
“That was devastating for a lot of reasons,” recalled Perri, the first-year head coach. “These were kids that I recruited and they made a really poor decision.”
While dealing with the public relations nightmare last fall, Perri couldn’t even hold full practices because the team was so depleted.
And that was even before Boyd, the reigning Northeast Conference Player of the Year, was lost for the season with an ACL injury in December.
“I had four guys that were kicked out of school and I had two other guys that were hurt and didn’t do anything from August till November,” Perri said. “I had like five guys.”
Yet six months after the brawl and three months after Boyd’s injury, LIU-Brooklyn may be one of the most captivating stories of March Madness.
They qualified for the NCAA Tournament for the third straight year Tuesday night by virtue of a 91-70 blowout of Mount St. Mary’s in the Northeast Conference championship game at the LIU Wellness Center.
“This is the third year and it’s never been done in the Northeast Conference,” an exhausted-sounding Perri said Wednesday morning by phone. “No one’s ever gone three in a row, so obviously it’s a testament to these guys. I think there’s five guys that will have played in all three.
“It’s an awesome feeling for these guys, especially this one because of all the stuff that we had to deal with. We didn’t have any adversity the last two years. We had no injuries. We had no off-the-court-problems, no academic issues. There was no adversity and then for all the adversity that happened this year, it was like, OK, how are we going to handle it? Could our guys handle it. I didn’t now, I honestly didn’t know. They could have gone either way as far as I was concerned.”
Perri said the low point of the season came in early January when the Blackbirds had their 31-game home-winning streak snapped by Wagner in a game that was their fifth straight loss. Included in that streak was a loss at Lamar, whom Perri called “atrocious.”
Perri sat the team down and told them the defense was pathetic, that other teams were shooting close to 50 percent against them.
“We gotta own this right now,” he told them. “‘We’re the worst defensive team maybe in the country at this point,’ and they obviously didn’t like hearing that.”
Offensively, Perri said the 6-foot-7 Olasewere — who along with the others involved in the brawl was reinstated in early October but were suspended two games each — was trying to do too much on his own and was averaging seven or eight turnovers a game as a result.
“Teams started game-planning towards Jamal and Jamal started trying to do too much,” Perri said. “He thought he had to do everything by himself now that Julian was out.”
So Perri showed Olasewere film and explained that he needed to get his teammates involved.
Meantime, the coach chatted up Garner, a senior guard, and told him he needed to become more aggressive offensively. Perri said Garner was used to deferring to the trio of Boyd, Olasewere and Brickman, the team’s stars.
“We didn’t have enough guys that could create their own shot so he had to be more aggressive,” Perri said.
After the Wagner game, things started to click and the Blackbirds won 10 of their next 11.
They entered the NEC Tournament as the No. 3 seed and proceeded to win three straight games.
In the final, Garner went off for a career-high 31 points and Olasewere added 15 points and 10 boards. Garner averaged 28 points per game in the tournament and was named its MVP.
“Me and C.J. talked about everything we’ve been through from the suspensions, your player of the year goes down — it could have gone both ways,” Olasewere said. “We knew this one was personal.”
A year ago, LIU was a No. 16 seed and lost to No. 1 Michigan State in the first round under then-coach Jim Ferry, who left after last season for the Duquesne job.
This year, Perri said he expects his club to be in the play-in games next Tuesday in Dayton.
“I could see us being in the play-in just because we have some bad losses early on,” Perri said, pointing to Lamar and St. Peter’s.
Wherever they end up, the Blackbirds must be considered one of the true Cinderellas of March after what they endured this season.
“To their credit,” Perri said, “they worked. Every day in practice we got better defensively. We started gaining some confidence and once that started snowballing I was like we have as good a chance as anybody because our league has a whole lot of parity.”
