By SPENCER BATES
AMHERST, MA — After enduring its second separate three-game losing streak in its last eight games, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team triumphantly returned to the win column.
A full team effort in which they played to their identity, and also beat UMass at its own game, saw the Bonnies over the line with a 73-59 win on the road with five different players finishing with double-figure points.
A response, after the team’s heart-wrenching loss to Rhode Island just a number of days ago, that Schmidt was overall satisfied with.
“It’s always tough to win on the road, and coming off that tough loss at Rhode Island, our guys bounced back,” Schmidt said. “It was good to see. We didn’t play great, but we found a way to get a victory tonight.”
The first step in getting back on the winning side of things was returning to form. Schmidt has been clear that this year’s Bona team has to win going downhill, converting on the fast-break, in second-chance points and in the paint. They did all of those things against the Minutemen who would have liked to do the exact same thing to them.
“The offense wasn’t great, we got the ball inside, we out-scored them 42-28 in the paint, and that’s what we got to do. … We’re not a great shooting team, so we got to get the ball inside by the pass or the dribble. I thought Noel (Brown) did some stuff inside, we got to the foul line, and … we got 23 points off of off the turnovers and 11 points in second-chance and 17 and fast-break. That’s how we have to win. We can’t win in just the half-court, we’re not good enough.”
And while it was great to win in each of those categories, perhaps the most important statistic that Bona won was rebounding. UMass entered the game ranked first in the Atlantic 10 for combined team rebounds with an average of just over 40 per game.
“We won the backboard 37-31 and one of the strengths of UMass is the physicality,” Schmidt said. “We had more points in the paint, more second-chance points, we out-rebounded them. That’s what you got to do against UMass.”
Imposing himself on the glass was Chance Moore who returned to action, coming off the bench for Bona on the afternoon after missing the team’s last game at Rhode Island. The 15 points and 10 rebounds — five of which came on the offensive end — he recorded in his 37 minutes, were both team-highs. A performance, Schmidt noted, worthy of the Bona Belt.
“That’s how we need him to play,” Schmidt said. “If we had him against Rhode Island, it might have been a different story, but that’s how we need him to play. He’s a guy that has to get a double-double for us to be successful. He has the most athleticism, and when he’s engaged, he’s a really good player.”
Moore was supported on the offense with 14 points from Lajae Jones, 12 points apiece from Melvin Council Jr. and Noel Brown and 11 points from Jonah Hinton.
As for the Minutemen, Tarique Foster led the scoring with 14 points, but just behind him was Rahsool Diggins, their go-to man who netted just 13 points, a tally just over four points lower than his season average. Now, the hosts were without Jaylen Curry, which, Schmidt admitted, allowed his team to focus more on Diggins, who the Bona coach had no problem giving his flowers.
“(Diggins is) a really good player,” Schmidt said. “It’s just about trying to make it as hard for him as much as you can and try to make him put the ball down. They didn’t have Curry, so that helped us a little bit in that we could concentrate more on him. But he’s a hell of a player.”
One of the areas that Schmidt would like to see his offense shore up in the games to come is its turnovers. The Bonnies had six turnovers in the first 7.5 minutes of the game and finished with 11 in the first half. However, they managed to clean up their act in the second, turning the ball over just four times, but still, it is a category he will have his eyes on.
“We turned the ball over seven times in the first eight minutes,” Schmidt said. “They had a number of turnovers. It wasn’t a pretty game in the first five, six, seven minutes, from both sides, but we took care of the basketball in the second half and that helped us.”
Now, with just four games left in the regular season, and a full week until its next game, the key to carrying the momentum of the win over UMass through the rest of the campaign, Schmidt pointed out, will be health.
“We got to get healthy, hopefully we can do that,” Schmidt said. “And then we gotta get better. We’ll give them a couple days off and get back to work on Tuesday. … We need to get better. We play two games and we have another week off, so two of the last four weeks we have off. So we gotta get better and take advantage of the time getting healthy and getting better.”
St. Bonaventure will return home for its penultimate home game of the regular season on Feb. 22 when it will seek to avenge its loss to Duquesne from earlier in the season. Tip-off for that game is set for 4 p.m.
