Joe Mihalich is in his 17th season as a Division I head coach and his 39th year overall as a college coach. So there’s not much he hasn’t seen.

But about this three-stop, nine-day road trip to California that Hofstra embarked upon Wednesday…

“Long time ago, when I was an assistant at La Salle, we went to Tokyo and played in a tourney there,” Mihalich said Wednesday, referring to a trip the Explorers took in December 1990. “We were there for nine, 10 days.”

Mihalich paused.

“I’ll tell you what, it might not have been that long,” Mihalich said. 

Indeed, La Salle played just two games in Tokyo — it beat Baylor and Idaho — on Dec. 15-16, so even accounting for the particularly long travel and the extra days needed to adjust to the time change, it’s quite possible the Explorers spent less time overseas than the Pride will in California through Thanksgiving morning. 

Coincidentally, that La Salle trip came in the midst of a season in which the Explorers were trying to adjust to life without prolific scorer Lionel Simmons, who graduated the previous spring after scoring 3,217 points, which was at the time the third-most in Division I history.

Nearly three decades later, Mihalich is hoping the trip to California — which is part of an extended road trip that will be followed by a trek to Florida and the Boca Raton Beach Classic Dec. 1-2 — helps Hofstra find an identity in its first season without Justin Wright-Foreman, who scored 2,327 points, the second-most in school history, prior to graduating and being selected by the Utah Jazz in the second round of the NBA Draft.

? ? ➡️ ? LAX❗️#Hofstra has arrived‼️ #RoarWithPride ? pic.twitter.com/C5MbS9G7nn

— Hofstra Men's Basketball (@HofstraMBB) November 21, 2019

Hofstra, which begins the trip tonight by visiting UCLA at historic Pauley Pavilion, is 2-2 with convincing wins over the teams it should beat (a 94-74 victory over Monmouth and a 111-69 win over Division II New York Tech) and losses in toss-up games to San Jose State (79-71) and Bucknell (86-71), each of whom closed out their victories with red-hot outside shooting displays.

There are worse places for a team in transition to be than at .500 after four games. But Wright-Foreman didn’t leave behind a bare cupboard at Hofstra, which returned three starters — seniors Desure Buie and Eli Pemberton and junior Tareq Coburn — as well as junior Jalen Ray, who was the sixth man as a sophomore. The Pride was the preseason pick to win a jumbled CAA and opened the season as the league’s top-ranked team at KenPom.com.

Two weeks later, a spate of CAA teams — Northeastern, Towson, William & Mary and Delaware — are exceeding early expectations while Hofstra has fallen to 154th at KenPom.com, behind Northeastern, Towson and Charleston.

League play, of course, doesn’t begin until the weekend before the New Year. But it’s not too early for the Pride to start regaining some of the luster it enjoyed in October and early November. 

“I told the team beforehand: These next two weeks are going to — I don’t know if they’re going to define our season, but they’re going to give us a good gauge of where we are and what we’re going to do,” Mihalich said. 

Winning five in a row in the warm-weather states — after facing UCLA, Hofstra closes out the California trek by visiting Cal-State Fullerton on Sunday and San Diego on Thanksgiving Eve — would obviously be the optimal result, but Mihalich said he’ll consider the two trips successful if the five games help strengthen the Pride’s rotation and chemistry.

??? Time to check the highlights from Friday's #Hofstra win! #RoarWithPride pic.twitter.com/02VphengI4

— Hofstra Men's Basketball (@HofstraMBB) November 16, 2019

While Coburn (averaging a team-high 15.5 points and 7.5 rebounds per game) and Ray (14.5 points per game) have handled their increased roles, Buie and Pemberton have struggled from the field. The two combined to shoot 44.4 percent last year but are at an even 40 percent so far this season. Buie was 3-for-9 in the second half against San Jose State while Pemberton was 0-for-6 in the first half against Bucknell.

Sophomore Isaac Kante might have had the biggest shoes to fill — literally and figuratively — as the replacement for graduate student Jacquil Taylor, who was a revelation on both ends of the floor in his lone season with Hofstra. Kante, who sat out last season as a redshirt after transferring from Georgia, has a pair of double-digit rebound efforts while also enduring stretches in which he looks like someone who played fewer than 30 minutes at Georgia.

Of course, as Mihalich notes, Taylor needed some time last season before he became the Pride’s second-most important player behind Wright-Foreman.

“If you remember a year ago at this time, he wasn’t playing well,” Mihalich said of Taylor, who scored in double digits once and pulled down at least 10 rebounds twice in his first 11 games before recording six double-doubles the rest of the way. “The first third of the season, he was struggling to find himself. In the middle, he was good. And the last third, he was great. Took him a while to get going.”

Mihalich is almost as curious to see how the Pride’s reserves fare. While redshirt sophomore Kevin Schutte has been solid as Kante’s backup, a trio of newcomers — sophomore transfer Omar Silverio and freshmen Jermaine Miranda and Caleb Burgess — have been inconsistent in limited duty. The trio are averaging 11.5 points per game with 12 assists and 10 turnovers while reminding Mihalich he needs to exercise patience with players who aren’t nearly as experienced as his last crop of imports.

“We’ve got five guys that are new to the program and (three) of them are new to college basketball and they’re learning how to act and when to get excited, when not to get excited and everybody’s learning what their roles are,” Mihalich said. “It’s different. Last year, our new guys were fifth-year seniors (in) Danny Dwyer and Jacquil Taylor, who went to the NCAA Tournament with Purdue and Penn and played for four years. So these guys are brand new.”

The infusion of so many newcomers has also resulted in an understandable feeling-out process for the Pride. Mihalich considered Buie and Pemberton two-thirds of his leadership council the last two years along with Wright-Foreman, but even with their presence, it’s taken some time to get used to the absence of a dominant and universally popular player plus the immediately well-liked duo of Taylor and Dwyer.

While the Pride have been together for months and practicing for weeks, there’s no better lab for chemistry than a long road trip.

“Listen, we’re on the other side of the country and it’s just us,” Mihalich said. “So we’ve got to learn to travel together, live together, work together, win together. All that stuff.”

And if everything feels a little less new two weeks from now?

“You can measure the success in a lot of different levels, not just the wins and losses,” Mihalich said. “I’ll consider it a success if players six, seven, eight and nine close the gap a little. I’ll consider it a success if everybody gets a little better.”