The Manhattan Jaspers open the 2026–27 season with new names on the front of the jersey and the same old chip on their shoulder. This is head coach John Gallagher’s fourth year in Riverdale, and it arrives at a moment of identity for everybody in the building: the school rebranded from Manhattan College to Manhattan University in 2024, and the league it plays in — the Metro Athletic Athletic Conference to everyone over thirty, the MAAC — begins play this season as the Metro Conference. Only the program’s essence is unchanged. In Riverdale, Manhattan basketball has always been the Bronx’s defiant little program, the one that treats every March like a heist in progress.
Last season offered both the reminder of the ceiling and the weight of the floor. The 2025–26 Jaspers finished 12–19 overall and 8–12 in league play, ending up 12th in a 13-team conference and closing the regular season with a 69–65 home loss to Iona in which Terrance Jones poured in 23 points and snagged four steals — a one-man summary of the year. When Jones was on, Manhattan could punch with anyone in the Metro; when he wasn’t, the offense too often stalled and the defense couldn’t cover the difference. The Jaspers were competitive far more often than 12–19 suggests — they escaped Canisius 69–65 on the Western New York swing in February, took the fight to the league’s middle class all winter — but close losses don’t hang banners, and Gallagher enters year four with the program still searching for its first winning season under his watch.
Jones is the hinge on which 2026–27 turns. The Trenton, New Jersey senior guard averaged 12.5 points a night last season and took over games outright, none more emphatically than the 29-point eruption against Marist in February. He’s the Jaspers’ best on-ball defender too, the rare mid-major two-way guard who sets the tone at both ends. Around him, Gallagher has an experienced, guard-heavy rotation: Devin Dinkins and Jaden Winston give the backcourt two more veterans who can run the show, senior Brett Rumpel brings steadiness and shooting from Binghamton, and Anthony Isaac’s 12-point, two-steal night against Iona showed the Brooklyn junior can be a difference-maker. Up front, Fraser Roxburgh — the Australian sophomore who put up 14 points and six boards in that Canisius win — is the program’s best young big, joined by Bronx native Will Sydnor, junior Michael Lawlor and Croatian sophomore Marko Ljubicic. It’s a roster built for Gallagher’s preferred style: quick, scrappy, international in flavor with contributors from Spain, Portugal and Australia, and deep enough to press and run in waves.
The non-conference slate tells you how Gallagher wants this team tested. The Jaspers travel to the University of Miami on November 20 for a date with an ACC program — only the second meeting in school history, and a measuring stick for a roster full of players who believe they belong on that stage. Gallagher is 2–8 lifetime against current ACC opposition, with both wins coming against Boston College, and the Miami trip follows the program’s pattern of scheduling up: two years ago the Jaspers went to Virginia and walked out of Charlottesville with a 74–65 loss they were proud of. These are the games that prepare a mid-major for March, and in a one-bid league, March is the entire season.
Because the giant-killer DNA is real, and it is the program’s birthright. Manhattan owns two of the most beloved upsets in NCAA Tournament history: the 1995 shocker, when Fran Fraschilla’s 13th-seeded Jaspers stunned No. 4 Oklahoma, and the 2004 masterpiece, when Bobby Gonzalez’s 12 seed took down No. 5 Florida. Nine years apart, same script — the little school from the Bronx walking into March and ruining somebody’s bracket. Those two nights are why every power-conference coach who sees Manhattan on the schedule swallows a little harder. The Jaspers’ tournament résumé runs deeper than the upsets: the program danced in 1958, in 1993 under Steve Lappas, and twice more in the modern era.
That modern era was authored by Steve Masiello, whose 2011–22 tenure delivered the program’s most sustained relevance. Masiello’s Jaspers won back-to-back league championships in 2014 and 2015, storming through the conference tournament and returning Manhattan to the NCAA field with teams that played with a snarl — hard-nosed defense, fearless shot-making, and the unmistakable Riverdale edge. Those two dances reconnected the generations of Jasper fans who had lived off the ’95 and ’04 tapes, and they remain the standard against which every Manhattan season is measured. When the Jaspers are good, Draddy Gymnasium is one of the great rooms in mid-major basketball.
Draddy is the program’s soul: 2,525 seats tucked into the Riverdale campus, old-school and intimate, where the crowd is close enough to hear the sneakers squeak and the students make every possession feel personal. Manhattan is the Bronx’s college team — a Lasallian school founded by the Christian Brothers in 1853, sitting on a hill above the Hudson with a view of the Palisades, impossibly green and collegiate for a borough better known for concrete. The basketball program has always drawn its toughness from the address: New York City kids, tri-state grinders, players who treat every game like somebody disrespected them.
Even the nickname is pure New York baseball lore. The Jaspers are named for Brother Jasper, the school’s legendary baseball coach and prefect of discipline in the 1880s, credited with inventing the seventh-inning stretch during a Manhattan game at the Polo Grounds — he called time so the restless students could stand and stretch, and the tradition stuck across the entire sport. Only at Manhattan does the basketball team’s identity trace back to a 19th-century monk who accidentally changed baseball.
So what does the breakthrough look like in 2026–27? It starts with defense traveling and Jones closing. Gallagher’s best Manhattan teams — the 16–12 group of 2024–25 — won by guarding, rebounding in traffic and getting enough from the perimeter. The Metro’s top end is unforgiving — Quinnipiac and Fairfield set the pace, Mount St. Mary’s has muscle — but the middle of this league is a knife fight every year, and a veteran backcourt is the best weapon in a knife fight. If Roxburgh takes the sophomore leap and the freshmen guards (Quron Elliott, Omari Moore, Asier Miguel) give real minutes, the Jaspers have the depth to climb from 12th to the top half. And in a league where the whole season is three games in March, that’s all it takes. In Riverdale, the next stunner is always brewing.