Desure Buie, Hofstra motivated after 16-game win streak comes to an end
Hofstra guard Desure Buie brings the ball upcourt during the first half against Northeastern at the Mack Sports Complex on Jan. 5. Credit: Lee S. Weissman/Lee S. Weissman
Desure Buie was not about to let the nation’s longest college basketball winning streak end without a struggle. Normally an assist-first player, the point guard found another gear Saturday at Northeastern and scored a career-high 22 points. It just wasn’t quite enough.
“It was not like it was just me, playing freely. I was just trying to do whatever, to win,” he said, back on campus Monday after the 75-61 defeat. “I was just trying to motivate my teammates.”
That is one streak that will not stop as long as Buie, a senior, plays for Hofstra (and he has another year of eligibility left because he missed most of his sophomore season with a torn ACL). He will keep leading, keep motivating, keep dishing off — especially to his closest friend on the team, Justin Wright-Foreman — and keep trying to do whatever.
“He’s really a special guy. He’s got some depth to him,” coach Joe Mihalich said, adding that Buie had the best insight during an informal meeting with a few players in his office Sunday. “He said, 'You know what, Coach? The problem is us, and that’s the easiest thing to fix.’
“I wish I had thought of that,” the coach said.
From the Pride’s perspective, the best part about the streak was that many people began thinking about Hofstra. The attention became national over the final two weeks, when the mid-major in Hempstead emerged with the longest unbeaten run in the country.
“There were a lot of people who stopped me, even on campus, going, 'You’ve got to keep it going, keep it alive,’ ” Buie said. “That’s dope for us, for our school, our community. That brings more people to our games.”
With students back on campus (most of the streak occurred during finals and intersession), the home game against William & Mary Saturday is a sellout. “That run was phenomenal, it was fun. And it was a lot of hard work. It’s not like it just magically happened,” the point guard said.
You could say the whole thing was a proverbial learning experience, a phrase that is more than a tired cliché for Buie. Having been uncertain about a major, the graduate of Wings Academy in the Bronx is as proud of his 3.92 grade-point average as he is of his 5.0 assists per game. He gives his own huge assist to the team’s academic adviser, Rachel Peel, for steering him toward linguistics and putting him on track to earn a master’s degree.
He puts his language skills to work on the court, being blunt with Wright-Foreman, a potential NBA talent with whom Buie has been close since they were teammates on a New York City high school all-star team. “Sometimes, as a friend, my job is not to tell him what he wants to hear," Buie said. "I’m going to tell him the truth: 'Today, you looked like a pro’ or ‘This day, you were average.' ”
Hofstra (19-4, 9-1 in the CAA) was way above average for more than two months. It had a flawless stretch until Saturday. “I’m going to be very, very honest with you,” Buie said. “That night, we got off the bus, I’m like, 'This just feels unusual.’ We hadn’t lost in so long, but now we know what losing feels like again. That humbled us. We need to step it up a notch.
“The streak mattered. But it doesn’t now.”
Olaniyi finds scoring touch
Stony Brook guard Elijah Olaniyi reacts after scoring and getting fouled during the second half of a game at Island Federal Credit Union Arena on Saturday. Credit: Joseph D. Sullivan
Elijah Olaniyi is fluent in French, Spanish and defense. The Stony Brook sophomore is known for stopping hot scorers, but he proved on Saturday that he can be one, too.
He achieved his first 20-point game for the Seawolves in an important 86-77 win over Hartford, reaching that mark in the first 15 minutes. He set a positive tone for a team that had lost two consecutive games. By the time he was done, he had 28 and Stony Brook, at 6-2, still was within a game of first place in the America East.
Olaniyi, born and raised in Newark with a multilingual background after his parents emigrated from Nigeria, was the conference’s rookie of the year last season. “Even with those accolades, I felt I could have helped my team more,” he said earlier this season. “So I used the summer to get stronger, get bigger and got more skilled.”
Local connection on NET committee
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the new NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), which has replaced the RPI as the method to rank teams, but it doesn’t hurt. Among the coaches on the advisory committee for the startup was Bill Coen of Northeastern, whose team ended Hofstra’s winning streak Saturday.
After he played for Hamilton College upstate and before he got into coaching, Coen spent three years as a software engineer for Raytheon and worked on the Patriot missile system. That reflects well on his high school education: Coen graduated from, and played basketball for, Port Jefferson.
As for the NET, through the past weekend’s games, St. John’s was ranked the highest among New York-area teams, at No. 45. Providence, its opponent at the Garden at noon Saturday, is 80th.
