Childhood friends Juan’ya Green and Ameen Tanksley breathe life into Hofstra basketball

Though its life on this planet has been brief, the Barclays Center has already hosted a number of the world’s greatest basketball players. The arena is home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, and has also hosted a number of high-profile early season college basketball tournaments, as well as the Atlantic 10’s postseason tournament.

Amongst all the talent that has filtered out of the Barclays locker rooms, just one player has posted a triple-double inside the building. There’s a strong chance that even if you’ve heard of him, you’re still not 100 percent sure how to pronounce his name.

On Dec. 28, Hofstra guard Juan’ya Green scored 15 points to go with 10 rebounds and 10 assists in the Pride’s 88-62 victory over LIU-Brooklyn. The triple-double was not only the first to occur inside the Barclays Center, but it was the first in the history of Hostra basketball, a period which spans more than 70 seasons.

Sexy tidbits like the one which resulted from Green’s performance are good for capturing the college basketball world’s attention. Once you look in Hofstra’s direction, however, it becomes clear quite quickly that the bigger story there is two childhood friends looking to pull an entire program out of a very dark place.

Hofstra was never the plan for Green or Ameen Tanksley, a pair of Philadelphia natives who grew up minutes from one another and who had talked about playing college basketball together before they were even in high school. Green wound up starring at Archbishop Carroll, while Tanksley was a two-time All-State selection at Philly powerhouse Imhotep Charter. When the time came to pick a college, each agreed to keep their childhood pact and committed to play for Joe Mihalich at Niagara.

The good times continued in college, where the pair became arguably the two best players on a Purple Eagle team that rolled to a MAAC regular season title in 2012-13. Although Niagara was upset in the semifinals of the conference tournament, the season was still so successful that it landed Mihalich a new gig at Hofstra, and left Green and Tanksley with a decision to make.

“When he said he was leaving, we didn’t know what to do,” Green told The New York Post last month. “We sat down and talked about it and weighed all the positives and negatives. First, we didn’t want to sit out a full year. We really didn’t want to sit out a full year, but we just looked at it as being a positive that we could get better and we could build our games and we could look at the game from a coach’s perspective and see the things we used to do wrong on the court.”

So the pair headed to Hofstra, a program reeling from an embarrassing 2012-13 in which the team nearly had more player arrests (6) than wins (7). Four of those arrests had come from a burglary scheme in which a quartet of Pride players admitted to stealing more than $10,000 worth of laptop computers, iPads and other items from fellow students. The result was scathing criticism from all over the country, and even some brief talk that the team should have forfeited the rest of its season.

The fact that the program hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2001 was the last thing on athletic director Jeff Hathaway’s mind when he brought Mihalich in to clean things up.

As expected, things started slow. Even with Illinois State transfer Zeke Upshaw averaging nearly 20 points per game, the Pride struggled to get to 10 win sin Mihalich’s first season on the job, and finished second to last in a subpar Colonial Athletic Association.

Fast-forward nine months and the Pride is set to enter conference play with as many wins as it had in the entirety of the 2013-14 regular season. They’ve lost just once at home, and their lone double-digit defeat is a 76-64 decision at NC State all the way back on Nov. 17.

The biggest reason for the turnaround is the duo from Philly. Tanksley is the team’s leading scorer (19.5 ppg) and rebounder (6.2 rpg), while Green is right behind him in points (17.7 ppg) and ranks ninth in the nation in assists (6.7 apg). On Dec. 10, the two combined to score 40 points in a 105-64 road victory over Coppin State. It was the first time in more than 23 years that a Hofstra team had eclipsed 100 points.

“I was hopeful that it could be this way, but I am surprised at how quickly these guys have shown they were back and could be this good.” Mihalich said. “They used last year wisely, they did not just punch a clock. They made the most out of it. They got better every day. They pushed themselves and they pushed each other.

“The way they communicate is incredible and their chemistry is contagious. Everybody feels it. Everybody wants to be a part of it.”

In a CAA still adjusting to life without the likes of VCU and George Mason, there is no clear front-runner. Hofstra will enter league play on Saturday with the conference’s best overall record and legitimate dreams of winding up in the field of 68.

Not bad for a program that was at the very bottom of the college hoops world just 19 months ago, and not bad for a couple of old friends who could only dream of this when they were children.