PISCATAWAY  – Hamady Ndiaye folded his 7-foot frame onto the thin little bench in Rutgers’ track locker room.

Jonathan Mitchell had pretended he didn’t hear the booing. Mike Rosario had sworn he didn’t. Freshman Dane Miller had admitted the catcalls at his coach hurt and then changed the subject and Ndiaye, with a turned ankle too big to slide into his boot, could’ve done exactly the same.

But after logging 108 games as a Scarlet Knights, after yet another demoralizing, oh-so-close loss – this one an 81-65 setback to no. 5 Syracuse – Ndiaye wasn’t taking any easy route. He looked straight at the television camera, he smiled at the four people arced around him and the senior from Senegal said there’s no shying away from the truth.

“We’re going through some crisis right now,” he said. “There’s a lot of words going around about us, the coaches, the team. It’s hard on the team but at the same time we have to learn how to deal with it. No matter what people say outside, it’s not about that right now. It’s about us coming out and giving it our best.”

For a while there Wednesday night, the Scarlet Knights really seemed to be. It’s been a brutal week, from supposed cornerstone forward Gregory Echenique requesting a release from his scholarship to former forward JR Inman’s ranting diatribe against coach Fred Hill on Facebook. The calls for Hill’s dismissal have turned into a chorus, chatter has made a Rosario departure seem like a fait accompli and then came the introductions at Rutgers Athletic Center, when the boos rained down on Hill.

And yet, after falling into the usual ugly halftime hole (this one was 18), the Scarlet Knights kept clawing. 

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