PHILADELPHIA, PA — On the back of its second-half struggles, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team fell 75-64 to Saint Joseph’s, its first loss to the Hawks since 2018.
The Bonnies, in search of their first three-game win streak in the Atlantic 10 this season, kept pace with the Hawks through the first 20 minutes of play, at times holding leads and finding its way through the signature drop defense Bona coach Mark Schmidt had his team honing in on in the buildup to the game. They entered halftime with the scores knotted up at 35 apiece. Unfortunately, the story for after the intermission was one of offensive miscues and flat out missed shots.
“I thought we got off to a good start, I thought our offense was going, we played well against their drop defense,” Schmidt said. “Noel (Brown) was getting some stuff and we were up by 10. And then they make a run. And you know, they got really good players and I thought at halftime, being even, we’ll take that. Coming out in the second half, we missed some bunnies, missed some easy ones and then they started attacking us, got us in the open court.”
And once the blood was in the water, Saint Joe’s wasted no time taking advantage, getting Bona on its heels and scoring with incredible efficiency.
The Hawks shot 47.5% from the field, as a team, over the course of the entire game and over 51% in the second half alone. They were spurred along by Xzayvier Brown and Rasheer Fleming, who scored 22 and 19 points apiece, making up for the uncharacteristically low point tally from the team’s leader in points per game, Erik Reynolds II, who finished with eight on the night.
Meanwhile, the Bonnies, after an incredibly efficient first half in which they shot over 53% from the field, shot just over 30% in the second half.
“They’re really good one-on-one players,” Schmidt said of Saint Joseph’s trio of scorers. “If you’re in a fight, you can’t fight on your heels. If you’re backpedaling, you’re going to get knocked out, and they got us on our heels. They were going downhill and we had a hard time.”
Bona was led in the scoring column by Melvin Council Jr., who recorded a team-high 18 points. Behind him, Lajae Jones contributed 14 and Noel Brown added 13 to the tally. Council and Noel Brown each roped in eight rebounds as well. Unfortunately, a low-scoring, four-point performance from Jonah Hinton (1-for-6 from the field), and just nine points from Chance Moore did not help the Bonnies.
Bona was only down by four with 10 minutes still to play, it was the struggles the team had after that moment, missing some easy buckets, that, Schmidt noted, were the turning points of the game.
“It was 57-51 and we missed the bunny down there, they went down the other end and got a 3-point play, then we threw the ball away, and I thought that, with six minutes left, was the difference,” Schmidt said. “Then it went from 57-51 to a 10-point game.”
St. Bonaventure will now look to bounce back in a big way with only a couple games left in the regular season before heading to Washington D.C. for the Atlantic 10 tournament. It’s next game, its penultimate, and final home game, of the regular season will be back in the Reilly Center on March 5 at 7 p.m.
