At the end of the college basketball season, the Rider/Sienna game that took place on Tuesday night will be more or less an afterthought. It will likely have absolutely no bearing on who wins the MAAC conference and qualifies for the NCAA Tournament. But it did feature one of the wildest finishes you’ll see this college hoops season.
With about two minutes to go in the game and Sienna leading by 7, a wild brawl broke out amongst the players who were on the court after Siena’s Khalil Richard fouled Rider’s Stevie Jordan hard. Two players, Siena’s Marquis Wright and Rider’s Anthony Durham, were eventually ejected for throwing punches, and at one point, the head coaches for both teams, Siena’s Jimmy Patsos and Rider’s Kevin Baggett, ran out onto the court and started yelling at one another. The coaches had to be physically separated, as it looked like they might end up fighting if no one stopped them.
Eventually, cooler heads prevailed, and the game ended with Siena earning a 78-68 win. But the action didn’t stop there. As the Siena players lined up to shake hands with the Rider players following the game, Rider players and coaches walked off the court and headed back towards their locker room. And that led to Patsos walking through an imaginary handshake line and shaking hands with, well, no one.
"They were gone," Patsos said. "I just kept going. I went with it."
Patsos later said that he didn’t mind Baggett taking his team off the court immediately and skipping the post-game handshakes. Baggett also took some time to address it with ESPN and said that he thought he had a good reason for doing it.
"I decided not to shake hands, because I didn’t want anything to escalate again between the teams," he said. "That’s my prerogative—to protect my team whether anyone else thinks it’s good sportsmanship or not."
You can watch both the brawl and Patsos walking through the invisible handshake line in the clip above. What a weird way to end a game.
