Jeremy Hazell "90%" likely to play tonight

According to NJ.com's Brendan Prunty, there is a "90%" chance that Jeremy Hazell suits up for Seton Hall tonight when the Pirates head to Chicago to take on DePaul.

Obviously, this is a great story -- Hazell has undergone surgery on a broke wrist and been shot in the past month -- but that's another post for another time.

Keep an eye on this move if you are a Big East fan. There were rumblings that Hazell was going to be out for the season and that the Seton Hall staff was going to redshirt him. The Pirates have struggled offensively this year and Hazell is one of the most potent scorers in the country. He also showed an improvement in his shot selection in the three games he played earlier in the season. For those unfamiliar, shot selection was the biggest reason that Hazell wasn't ranked among the elite players in the Big East despite being a 22.3 ppg scorer as a junior.

With Hazell back in the fold, this Seton Hall team will be back to full strength. Could they make a run at the tournament in Big East play?

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Jeremy Hazell and Tracy Smith suffer injuries

Two teams expecting to have rebound seasons lost a key player in the opening game of their respective early season tournaments.

Tracy Smith of NC State will miss three weeks after injuring his knee early in the Wolfpack's Charleston Classic opener against East Carolina. He went back to Raleigh where he had arthroscopic knee surgery which found no significant damage to the knee.

NC State still advanced to the finals where they will face Georgetown Sunday night.

Seton Hall's Jeremy Hazell broke a bone in his wrist against Alabama in the Pirate's Paradise Jam opener. He will miss four to six weeks, including Sunday's semifinal matchup with Xavier.

The injury to Hazell has to be especially frustrating. He finally seems to have learned how to be an efficient scorer. His last two games, Hazell has taken 23 shots and scored 55 points.

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Jeremy Hazell wasn't taken out for being a selfish player; he was taken out for being a selfish person

Earlier this week, we touched on the fact that Seton Hall's Jeremy Hazell was benched by head coach Bobby Gonzalez in a game that Seton Hall was down only 11 with 4:06 remaining. Its also worth noting that Hazell has 32 of Seton Hall's 62 points at that juncture.

Speculation flew that the reason that Gonzo pulled Hazell was due to three consecutive terrible shots forced by the junior.

He cleared that up yesterday:

There is a lot of misinterpretation, a lot of misinformation. I'm the head coach of this program and I make those decisions—not the athletic director, not the administration, not a prep school coach, not a high school coach. I make the decisions. There's been a lot of confusion out there and I just want to make sure there is no confusion.

I didn’t take Jeremy out just because of shot selection. People think he missed some shots and I yanked him. What needs to be cleared up is Jeremy didn't run back on defense, which is basically a cardinal sin.

The other thing is you can't stand outside of the huddle and not join your teammates in the huddle. I don't want to call a guy out but I want to make it clear that the stuff he did was unacceptable. Those were the reasons why he didn't go back in the game. It has nothing to do with waving the white flag or giving up.

Going forward, I've had a meeting with Jeremy, I've talked to him about how he has to understand that given the same situation he has to handle things differently.

Seton Hall has the talent to be an NCAA Tournament team, but Gonzo has yet to find a way to get that talent to mesh well enough to win some games. Maybe now we get a little insight as to why.

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Jeremy Hazell still doesn't know what a good shot is

Two weeks ago, after watching Seton Hall beat Louisville, we wrote about how Jeremy Hazell's ability to decipher a good shot from a bad shot would be the difference for Seton Hall this season.

Never was that more on display than last night.

Hazell was unconscious last night against Villanova. His layup with 12:53 left gave the Hall a 58-56 lead and gave Hazell 32 points. He scored those 32 points on just 20 shots, most of which came within the flow of the offense or off of a set play designed to get him a shot.

Hazell shot Seton Hall in, then out, of their conference tilt with Villanova.
(photo credit: Bleacher Report)

In other words, Hazell scored 32 points on 20 shots Bobby Gonzalez wanted him to take.

But the tides turned very quickly for Seton Hall. Villanova would go on an 11-0 run to open up a 73-62 lead. Where was Seton Hall during that run?

Watching Jeremy Hazell go 1-on-3 or 1-on-4, fire up tough, contested shots, and then beg the officials for a foul.

So what did Gonzo do?

Benched him, with 4:06 left down 11. He benched a guy that had scored 32 points with four minutes left in a very winnable game.

Adam Zagoria had a chance to catch up with Gonzo after the game:

"It's not the way you want to play college basketball," Gonzo said. "I wouldn't be doing a good job of teaching him, I'm not helping him. So basically I took him out and I told him 'Jeremy you can go 1-on-1 and you can be forceful, press and look for some shots but you can't just come down every time and take bad double-clutch shots.'

"You don't get points for degree of difficulty with guys tackling you and then complain to the officials because even the officials started getting frustrated with him. It was just a chance for me to be a leader and try to teach him something that could help him."

The move was necessary.

Until Hazell learns what is a good shot and how to use his teammates, Seton Hall is going to continue to lose close games.

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Jeremy Hazell's shot selection is the difference for Seton Hall

Jeremy Hazell can score.

No one has questioned that. Ever.

He's averaging 22.9 ppg. He put 41 on West Virginia. He's hit 30 four times.

No, the issue for Hazell isn't putting up points. Its how he gets his points.

Prior to Thursday night's game against Louisville, an argument could have been made that Hazell was the most selfish player in the Big East, if not the entire country. Yes, Hazell is an outstanding three-point shooter, but he only makes 32.5% of his attempts from deep.

Jeremy Hazell was, believe it or not, efficient against Louisville, scoring 25 points on just 12 shots.
(photo credit: Washington Post)

Why?

Because Hazell has a bit of a problem with shot selection. He has a knack for hitting some incredibly tough shots, but far too often he forces quick shots, challenged shots, early in a possession. There is nothing wrong with taking a tough shot at the end of a shot clock, or the end of the game, or even when you've knocked down three or four jumpers in a row - your proverbial heat check.

But there is something wrong with taking the number of forced jumpers that Hazell was taking early in the season. Take a look at some of the shooting performances Hazell has had this season:

• In a win over Monmouth, Hazell scored 26 points, but was 9-23 from the floor and 5-14 from three.
• In a loss at Temple, Hazell finished with just 11 points while shooting 4-17 from the field and 1-11 from three.
  
• Hazell's two best scoring outputs of the season came in back-to-back losses against West Virginia and Syracuse, when he went for 41 and 38 points, respectively. But in those two games combined, Hazell was just 26-64 from the floor and 10-34 from three.
  
• Hazell scored just 13 points on 5-20 shooting, 2-8 from three, in a loss at UConn.

And while he has had his economic scoring performances, those are, for the most part, few and far between.

Now fast forward to Thursday's game against Louisville. Seton Hall picked up a win in a do-or-die game for the Pirates at-large hopes as they played arguably their best basketball of the season.

While there were some line-up changes - most notably using Keon Lawrence strictly off of the ball - the biggest difference was Hazell and his shot selection. The 6'5" junior finished the game with 25 points, but he only needed 12 shots to do so, hitting nine and making 3-6 from deep. He played 39 minutes, and in those 39 minutes, Hazell took just a single bad shot.

And it was an awful shot. With just four minutes left on the clock and the Hall up 12, Hazell airballed a deep three with a good 30 seconds on the shot clock after the Pirates had broken the Louisville press.

Doris Burke, who was doing the color for the game (Side note: Burke is a very underrated commentator. She really knows the game, she breaks it down in an insightful manner, and she does it in a way that makes what she is explaining seem very basic. Bill Simmons may disagree, but Burke should be spending more time away from the sideline.), ripped him. The twitterati ripped him. No doubt Bobby Gonzalez ripped him.

But while ripping him for taking a poor shot with a big lead late in the game, you must also commend him. Hazell's mindset is "shoot, shoot, shoot, score, score, score". He has always looked for his best shot first, and the best shot for the team second. But tonight, it was different. Louisville chased Hazell around all night, for the most part having a defender in his jock everytime he caught the ball.

What happened as a result is that driving lanes opened up. Post up opportunites became available. And for maybe the first time in a game I've seen Hazell play, he didn't take it as a personal challenge. He didn't try to prove that he could score despite an opponent's game plan centering around slowing him down. If he didn't have a shot or a lane to drive on the catch, he moved the ball. This meant that guys like Jordan Theodore, who played a fantastic game, going for 17 points and 4 assists on a season-high 11 shots, and Keon Lawrence and Eugene Harvey had an opportunity to take advantage of those driving lanes.

Seton Hall has a lot of talent on their roster. How much? Well, that's tough to say, but I think I'm far from the only person that believes this team is much better than their 11-6, 2-4 in the Big East, record would indicate.

Tonight, the Hall played their best game of the season and picked up arguably their biggest win of the season. The reason why is that Jeremy Hazell, the most talented player on a talented roster, gave his teammates the opportunity to show how good they are.

Hopefully, he will learn from that.

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