The Rutgers men’s basketball team got onto a plane on Wednesday afternoon with their destination set for Chicago ahead of a Gavitt Games tilt against DePaul.
The first true road game in front of fans for the Scarlet Knights in 622 days after all 10 of last season’s away trips were played in front of cardboard cutouts due to the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday night’s contest is the first real test of the season for Steve Pikiell’s squad on their journey in search of a second consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance this spring.
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The sixth-year head coach is confident his group can handle the environment.
“We have experienced guys, they know how hard it is to go on the road and win games,” he said Tuesday. “We know what the challenges are.”
The venue Pikiell will walk into on Thursday is different -- Wintrust Arena was built in the years since -- as is the reality of where his program is compared to the last time he took Rutgers to face DePaul.
Five years earlier to the day, then-first-year head coach Steve Pikiell and his Scarlet Knights took the same trip in what his first road game at the helm in Piscataway. Back then, the NCAA Tournament bid was still a pipe dream for the program. The drought was entering its 26th season and March Madness was a mountain that seemed far too big to climb for the downtrodden program.
Pikiell disproved that theory in five years, steadily bringing the Scarlet Knights along until breaking through into the 68-team field that eluded them for so long in his fifth season.
And some of the first steps of that climb came in November of 2016 in the Windy City.
Asked about that contest on Tuesday night following a win over NJIT, Pikiell was not in a reflective mood, his mind still racing from the game that just ended and the one-day turnaround his team had for Thursday’s contest.
So we’ll reminisce for him.
The Scarlet Knights were in a good spot that November, standing at 2-0 heading into the contest after wins over Division II program Molloy and low-major team Drexel. It does not seem like much now, but for a program that lost 47 of its previous 64 games entering that season, every victory was worth savoring.
But this time, the success did not feel like it would be short-lived.
Jake Dadika, a junior walk-on on that team, remembers the belief in Pikiell’s vision building up progressively leading into that first season. It began immediately with the one-on-one meetings Pikiell held with every player in the program upon arrival, in which he laid out his vision for Rutgers basketball and asked them for their feedback on what they’ve seen and what they would like to see improve in the program.
It built throughout the preseason as the players watched the evolution of their preparation, their workouts, the drills they did, the strength and conditioning program they underwent. Dadika remembers how “defensively-focused” the preparation was and how everything was “ran perfectly.”
“Everything was a tight ship, which was exactly what we needed,” Dadika told NJ Advance Media this week. “It changed the program for the better.”
That became obvious in the first games of Pikiell’s tenure, where the pillars of his program -- defense and rebounding -- were front and center. The Scarlet Knights dominated the boards in those contests, outrebounding their first two opponents by 13 and 27, respectively, and holding both right around the 65-point “speed limit” Pikiell’s defenses aim to keep opposing offenses at.
That continued into Allstate Arena -- DePaul’s former home venue -- where they dominated the Blue Demons for most of the evening. Rutgers led for the entire second half after a back-and-forth start and much of that was thanks to their effort on the boards.
The Scarlet Knights outrebounded DePaul by 19, grabbing 51.4% of their own missed shots and getting 17 second-chance points in a 66-59 victory that snapped a 20-game road losing streak, handing them their first win outside Piscataway in nearly two years and pushing them to 3-0 for the first time since the 2008-09 season. Then-junior guard Mike Williams, whose hard-nosed play style personified the type of basketball Pikiell wanted his team to play, led the way with 14 points and nine rebounds.
“We were just coming off a very bad losing season. To start 3-0, it was just like ‘wow, this is new,’” Williams said this week.
For the first time in a long time, Rutgers basketball had something worth celebrating.
“That was the first plane ride home we had some excitement on,” Dadika, who now works in financial planning and wealth management, said. “Usually you’re on the bus and you’re beat down because it’s another loss. A win was a great start.”
That momentum continued into an 11-1 start. It came against what was the second-weakest schedule in the country at the time, and Rutgers eventually crashed down to Earth when it lost 17 of its last 21 games, but that did not matter: the Scarlet Knights believed for the first time in years.
It’s not like losing was new to Rutgers, anyway.
It had lost 25 games the year prior, the final season of former head coach Eddie Jordan’s tenure that featured losses of 50 and 34 points to Purdue and Michigan State, respectively. In Dadika and Williams’ first two years on the banks, the Scarlet Knights went a combined 17-47, went through two separate losing streaks of at least 15 games and lost 76% of Big Ten games by double-digits.
The Scarlet Knights were still losing conference games in Pikiell’s first year, but they were competitive when they did and even managed to sneak some victories in. Rutgers won more Big Ten games in 2016-17 (4) than it had in the previous two years combined (3).
The year after, the Scarlet Knights finished 15-19 and made a run to the quarterfinals of the Big Ten Tournament that served as a preview of what was to come. The Scarlet Knights then knocked on the door of the NCAA Tournament in 2019, were robbed of an appearance in 2020 by a pandemic before finally breaking through in a big way in 2021 with a run to the second round.
So when Williams reflects on where the program has gone in the years since he graduated, he wasn’t surprised at all: this is what he expected.
“I already saw the building blocks,” Williams said. “I already saw it happening.”
Mike Williams, seen here battling for a ball against Minnesota's Isaiah Washington in a Big Ten Tournament first round game at Madison Square Garden in 2018, was a key member of Steve Pikiell's first two teams in Piscataway, thriving in his hard-nosed, defense-and-rebounded oriented play style.John Munson | NJ Advance Media f
After being on the ground floor of the build, Williams watched the final step toward the mountain top from afar, along with most of his former teammates. None of the players from Pikiell’s first team in 2016-17 were on the roster when the breakthrough happened, most playing professional basketball overseas by then, but they all watched closely from their new corners of the globe -- from Portugal to Poland, Italy to Japan, Slovakia to the Netherlands, and in Williams’ case, from England to Jordan.
And to some extent, they could all relate to the analogy Williams used to describe the Scarlet Knights’ ascension under Pikiell.
“(Before Pikiell arrived), it seemed like we were trying to climb Mount Everest with no pick ax, no gear, just bare hands,” Williams said of chasing the NCAA Tournament. “We fell a lot of times. But my last two years, we got some rope. It snapped sometimes, but we were able to claw our way back. There were some pit stops along the way, some changes to the crew, but they kept climbing and climbing and they finally reached the mountaintop.”
Naturally, Williams wishes he was a part of the breakthrough, but he takes solace in the part he played on the journey. Dadika and Williams got a chance to reflect on the program’s growth recently when they attended last week’s season opener against Lehigh. They were part of a sold-out crowd that watched the program unveil a banner celebrating its first NCAA Tournament appearance in a generation, both feeling proud of what they contributed to the climb.
“The fact of the matter is, I can say I was a hashmark of how far we went,” Williams said. “Even if my time has expired, to say I could have been almost at the top, it’s like ‘wow.’ I still can’t believe it, to be honest.”
Five years ago, the Scarlet Knights flew into Chicago as a Big Ten bottom-dweller with little hope on the horizon.
This Thursday night, they are one of the Big Ten’s best representatives in the Gavitt Games, with the most momentum they’ve had as a program since the heydays of the 1970′s.
No one would blame Pikiell for walking into Wintrust Arena on Thursday night and taking a moment on Thursday night to stop and reflect on the journey he and the program have undergone in the years since he last stepped in the building.
But that’s not Pikiell’s style.
As much as things changed in the big picture, Pikiell’s outlook that took the Scarlet Knights so far remains largely the same.
“We’ve got a long ways to go,’’ Pikiell said after that 2016 win.
“We’ve come a long way,” Pikiell said on Tuesday, five years and an NCAA Tournament bid later, “but we have a long way to go.”
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Brian Fonseca may be reached at [email protected].