Team: Seton Hall Pirates
2025-26 Record: 21-12, 10-10 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: Fourth, five games behind Villanova, one game in front of Creighton
Final 2025-26 Computer Rankings
NET: #53
KenPom.com: #51
BartTorvik.com: #56
Postseason: The Pirates advanced to the Big East semifinals with a win over Creighton, but had their season ended by St. John’s, 78-68. After they were left out of the NCAA tournament — at #53 in the NET with a 1-6 record in Quadrant 1, this was not a gigantic surprise — Seton
Hall released this statement:
Our men’s basketball program gave everything it had in what was a successful season that included 21 victories, the ninth top-five finish in the BIG EAST over the last 11 seasons and the nation’s second-best win turnaround from last season. After not receiving an NCAA Tournament bid, our student-athletes and coaches, in conjunction with administration, have decided to decline non-NCAA postseason tournament invitations for this year and turn their focus to the 2026-27 season. We congratulate Coach Holloway and his team on a tremendous season, and we thank Seton Hall fans for their support all season long. Our University remains committed to building on this year’s success as we prepare for the future.
I would like to specifically point at the “turn their focus to the 2026-27 season” part. Got it? Okay, next section.
Notable Departures: Eight guys who had a rotation role for the Pirates last season are gone. Top four scorers? Gone. Top four rebounders? Gone. The only guy who averaged more than 1.5 assists per game? Gone. All four guys who averaged at least a steal per game? Gone. Both guys who averaged more than a block per game? Gone, and Najai Hines, who led the entire Big East in blocks per game even though he didn’t start and averaged 18 minutes a night, is specifically gone to UConn.
Three of the four guys who started all 33 games are gone. Five of the six guys who played in all 33 games are gone.
Some of these guys, like leading rebounder Stephon Payne, are gone because their eligibility was up anyway and what else are they going to do? Some of these guys, like leading scorer Budd Clark, had eligibility left and they got outta town as was the case with Clark ending up at Ole Miss.
Notable Returners: There are two players returning from last season. One is Elijah Fisher who started all 33 games and averaged nearly 21 minutes per night. He chipped in 6.6 points and 2.9 rebounds, but he was not an outside shooting threat at just 23.7%. The other is Trey Parker, who is absolutely not the co-creator of South Park. This Trey Parker played in 32 of the 33 games — he missed their visit to UConn late in the season — coming off the bench in all of them, and he added 4.3 points and 2.8 rebounds a night. He is actually a worse shooter than Fisher, hitting just 20.5% of his 1.4 long range attempts per game.
And that’s it. That’s literally the full list of returning Pirates. No guys who were redshirting, no guys who played 4 minutes a game in 7 appearances, no walk-ons, nothing. It’s Fisher and Parker and that’s it.
Key Additions: There are three freshmen listed on the roster, with only one of them getting a listing over at 247 Sports. That’s probably more about the other two being international signings than anything else, but still, we can just keep moving forward here.
That gives the Pirates 10 transfers, one from the junior college ranks and nine from other Division 1 programs. The two most notable for name recognition reasons out of the nine Division 1 guys are Roddie Anderson (6’3”, 195 lb. fifth year guard, Orange County, California) and Simeon Wilcher (6’4”, 200 lb. senior guard, Plainfield, New Jersey). Anderson was at Xavier last season, sticking around after the coaching change most likely because of his ongoing injury rehab at the time more than anything else since now here’s here. He averaged 10.9 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 2.2 assists per game, mostly off the bench, for the Musketeers last season. Wilcher is a rebound transfer to the Big East, spending his first two years of college hoops at St. John’s. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to hang out with Rick Pitino any more, so he bounced off to Texas for the 2025-26 season. He went backwards on pretty much everything stats-wise from his second season with the Johnnies, and now he’s in South Orange to take another crack at success in the Big East.
Some of the other seven transfers have had interesting seasons in the past that imply that they could be doing something things for the Pirates this year. Rodney Brown (6’6”, 195 lb. senior guard, Perris, California) averaged 14.0 points per game last season for Loyola Marymount while shooting 38% on threes. Del Jones (6’3”, 187 lb. junior guard, Landover, Maryland) was a 17 point scorer for Radford last year, starting in all 32 of his appearances and playing more than 31 minutes a night. Kareem Thomas (6’5”, 195 lb. junior guard, Wilmington, Delaware) put up nearly 16 points per game as a sophomore last season and hit nearly 45% of his 4.0 three-point attempts per game, but was that worth leaving Dartmouth for Seton Hall? Devin Williams (6’10”, 205 lb. junior forward, Riverside, California) led the entire American Conference in blocks per game for FAU last year with 2.6, and he added 7.5 points and 5.2 rebounds as well. Mayar Wol (6’8”, 196 lb. senior forward, Raleigh, North Carolina) was a part-time starter and 20 minute a game guy for Bowling Green last season, ending up averaging 10.5 points per game.
Coach: Shaheen Holloway, entering his fifth season at Seton Hall and ninth season as a Division 1 head coach. He has a overall record of 134-122 and a 70-65 mark with the Pirates.
Outlook: Last year, Seton Hall had 10 new transfers coming off a season where they went 7-25 and were a truly wretched basketball team on the offensive end of the floor. That mixed with the worst KenPom.com defensive ranking since head coach Shaheeen Holloway’s first season at Saint Peter’s back in 2019, and so the Pirates were the worst high major team in the country in 2024-25. It wasn’t a bad thing that SHU was doing a hard reset on the roster as a result of that, but the question remained whether or not the reset would work.
It did work, mostly speaking, as Holloway guided the Pirates to a winning record for the third time in four years in South Orange and a 21 win season for the second time in three seasons. How did they pull that off? Seton Hall was one of the 20 most efficient defenses in the country last year according to KenPom.com, and at that point, mediocre offense instead of atrocious offense gets you to the edge of qualifying for the NCAA tournament.
But now Holloway is resetting his roster again. He has two rotation guys who really weren’t depended on for anything returning, which probably means that the Pirates are going to have to find load bearing pieces in their pile of 10 transfers and three freshmen. Holloway can clearly coach defense, even when their defense slipped, it was still top 90 in the country. Their problem in 2024-25 is that the Pirates were the second worst defense in the Big East during league play. If Holloway can figure out how to get this collection of guys to play together the way he got last year’s completely different collection of guys to play together, Seton Hall’s probably going to be a tough out at the very least this season.
Here’s a question for you, though: What if Seton Hall was merely 19-14 last season and 8-12 in Big East play? Do we think about the Pirates any differently if that was the case? Nothing else changes, just flipping two results. I ask this because Marquette completely flubbed the ending of two games against Seton Hall last season. At home in December, Marquette was up 73-66 with three minutes left and gave up a 13-0 run to lose by six. The Golden Eagles were up eight at the half in the visit to the Rock, then gave up a 12-2 run, and then couldn’t get it done out of a 64-64 tie with under two minutes left. Now, I’m not going to say that last year’s Marquette team should have won those games. Last year’s MU team was apparently cosmically unable to close out contests in anything resembling a competent fashion, so it’s not surprising that they had two more on the pile of disasters.
But I am saying that all signs point towards Marquette being better than last season. What if that flips two games on its own? What if Creighton is better than last year and the Pirates can’t squeak past the Bluejays at home by two points? What if Georgetown figures out how to score 52 points in a game at The Rock? Yes, Seton Hall won 10 games in Big East play, and all credit to Holloway for figuring out how to do it. They also squeezed their way into a few wins there, and if the competition level in the league boosts up a little bit this year — seven teams finished the year between #67 and #99 over at KenPom — then we have to wonder if Shaheen Holloway’s magic tricks are going to work again.
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