Angel Delgado doesn’t keep a count in his head during the game. He says he likes to be clueless as far as his game totals. It keeps him more focused on the task at hand, he says, so he just goes about his usual business of dominating the paint, logging another double-double performance and, hopefully, adding a ‘W’ in the win column for the Seton Hall Pirates.
“I always think that I only have two or three rebounds. I could have 15 but I never want anyone to tell me how many I have,” said Delgado, the Pirates’ 6-10 junior forward. “I always tell the guys never tell me how many rebounds I got, so I can keep going harder and harder.”
Of course there are exceptions to Delgado’s rule. Like this past Sunday, for instance. The Pirates were less than two minutes away from securing an 86-73 victory over St. John’s and there was Delgado on the bench watching the final moments tick off the game clock.
That’s when a Seton Hall fan in the crowd behind the Pirates’ bench yelled to him that he had 19 rebounds.
That immediately led to Delgado to some heavy campaigning by Delgado with head coach Kevin Willard to get him back into the game so he could pursue the rare 20-rebound game.
“(Willard) didn’t know I had 19 rebounds so I said ‘Put me in,’” Delgado said laughing. “And he was like, ‘Nah, there’s less than two minutes left.’ But I said, ‘Trust me, put me in.’ He said, ‘Ok, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just go.’”
Seconds later Delgado corralled the elusive 20
th rebound off a missed St. John’s free throw, and with it, he carved out his little niche of both the Seton Hall and BIG EAST record books with his first career 20-20 outing as he finished the game with 21 points and 20 rebounds.
Delgado became the first Pirate player to log a “20-20” game since Eddie Griffin did it with a 26-point, 21-rebound effort vs. St. Peter’s on Nov. 27, 2000, while also becoming the first BIG EAST player to pull off the feat since Providence’s Jamine Peterson hung 29 points and 20 rebounds on Rutgers on January 9, 2010.
Delgado also became just the seventh player in school history to log a 20-rebound effort and the first since Herb Pope pulled down 20 boards on January 8, 2011 vs. Syracuse. It was an outing that led St. John’s coach Chris Mullin to compare Delgado to Hall of Famer Moses Malone.
“I’d like to thank coach Mullin for the opportunity to be compared to a Hall of Famer,” Delgado said. “It’s a privilege. I felt way better after he said that. He gave me a lot of motivation after he said that.”
Delgado has no clear-cut answer as to why he has become a rebounding machine since arriving at Seton Hall for the start of the 2014-15 season. (By the way, teammate Khadeen Carrington thinks it has something to do with the amount of Spanish food Delgado consumes). But in his first two years with the Pirates, Delgado averaged almost a double-double each season, posting 9.3 points and 9.8 rebounds as a freshman before logging 9.9 points and 9.3 rebounds last year.
This season, however, Delgado has broken through to average a double-double through Seton Hall’s first 19 games with 14.7 points and a BIG EAST-best 12.4 rebounds per game. He is the only player in the conference averaging double-digit rebounds with DePaul’s Tre’Darius McCallum placing a distant second in the conference at 7.4 boards per game.
Delgado has posted 14 double-doubles so far this season and just saw his streak of 11 straight games with double-digit points and rebounds snapped at Villanova. So he wanted to begin another streak vs. the Johnnies last weekend.
“For sure. Against Villanova I wasn’t really prepared so that motivated me a lot, that I had to play harder (against St. John’s),” Delgado said. “After the Villanova game, the next day I went to the weight room so I could get ready for the next game. But I’m really happy about (the 20-20 game). I just want to make the school look great. I always want the school to be in the news. When someone does good, we all look good. That’s all I care about.”
Just how dominant was Delgado in his latest outing? Well, at a few different times in the game he was out-rebounding the entire St. John’s all by his lonesome.
“That’s pretty crazy,” Delgado said. “I didn’t know that.”
And if there was anyone out there who hadn’t heard of Delgado before last Sunday, they surely know of the menacing Pirate now.
“I don’t really do a lot of social media, but I think (more people will notice) now because not many people do 20-20,” said Delgado, who has been included in the BIG EAST’s Honor Roll in five of the past six weeks. “Now I just have to do it again so people will know me better.”
College basketball fans can get their next look at Delgado when the Pirates host No. 11 Butler Wednesday night at the Prudential Center at 8:30 p.m. in a game that will be carried by FS1. So what does Delgado have planned as an encore vs. the Bulldogs?
“Since I’m here we’ve never beaten Butler so I’m really excited for that game and I’m really motivated for that game because I’m trying to beat them twice this year,” said Delgado, who is 0-4 vs. Butler in his career. That’s all I care about right now.”
So another 20-20 game perhaps?
“Yeah I’m always trying to get a 20-20, every game,” Delgado said.
Delgado began the year not even listed on Seton Hall’s top 20 rebounders in school history. With the 236 boards he has posted already this season, he has rocketed up the charts and now sits with 858 rebounds in his career, putting him in seventh place. Former Seton Hall stars Mark Bryant (in 6
th place with 912) and Herb Pope (fifth place with 922) are now squarely in Delgado’s sights. He also sits just 95 points shy of the 1,000-point mark for his career.
So, can we say Delgado is the unquestioned best big man in the BIG EAST?
“If you say so,” he said with a laugh. “I said at media day that I wanted to be the best big man in the BIG EAST and that’s one of my goals.”