By SPENCER BATES
ST. BONAVENTURE — The final day of the regular season is here.
The past four months and all the trials and tribulations that have come and gone over that time have all led to this moment.
It is “desperation time” as St. Bonaventure women’s basketball head coach Jim Crowley coined it. Each and every team in an uber competitive Atlantic 10 is wringing out every last drop of effort they have left while jostling for position in the conference tournament.
The Bonnies found themselves on the receiving end of one such desperate effort from George Washington last time out.
After falling behind by a significant margin over the course of the first half in the nation’s capital, the Bonnies spent the rest of the Feb. 25 affair chasing the Revolutionaries. A hunt that nearly saw the lead change hands, but a response from the Revs to an early second half run from Bona put hopes of a comeback to rest.
“Where Loyola hit us with it late, I thought (George Washington) hit us with it early,” Crowley said. “We dug a big hole, we gave ourselves a chance early in the third quarter, but to their credit, they made a couple shots that put them over the top. We just gave them some easy ones that first quarter, and I think that really got their confidence going and we were playing catch up the whole time.”
In that game, Laycee Drake had a rare single-digit outing, netting just seven points on 3-for-12 shooting. The most reliable scorer for the Bonnies all season, Drake was kept quiet and was not the recipient of any fortunate bounces around the rim to bring her shooting percentage up. But that has not led to Crowley losing even an ounce of faith in his team’s talisman.
“I mean we 100% trust Laycee, she’s earned that,” Crowley said. “I know she’ll be fine, and I think she’ll come out very strong tomorrow. Our best offense comes when we create missed shots. Just looking at the GW game, at the start of the third quarter, we created missed shots and had a lot of efficiency offensively. We weren’t creating a lot of missed shots, and we weren’t executing defensively, some of our things as well as we needed to. So we weren’t able to get the ball going with any kind of tempo. … They were able to limit our opportunities. In the first half, we got a little stagnant, and we settled more than we should have.”
Notably, the GW fixture also saw the return from injury of Ivona Djikanovic. Despite not having played double-figure minutes since Jan. 3, or minutes in general since Jan. 18, Djikanovic has remained a big personality within the Bona team, remaining in full voice during warmups and on the bench, bits of effort that have been acknowledged by Crowley.
Now Djikanovic played just nine minutes and took just one shot against the Revs, but those numbers should be expected to rise very soon.
“Her spirit and her care for her teammates and her energy have been shown, and we know what a valuable thing that is in our program,” Crowley said. “Due to the injury, there wasn’t a lot of ability for her to do much to build up, she was able to get a couple partial practices and then one practice. So her limited minutes were more just (due to the fact that) she hasn’t gotten her lungs. … I would think those minutes will go up and hopefully continue to go up. … It’s good to have her back and I’m hoping she got the rust off a little bit Wednesday, a little bit more the last two days, and we’ll start to get back to what we know she’s capable of.”
There’s no better time to return to full health than right now for the Bonnies as the two consecutive defeats they have now suffered have set up a pivotal final day matchup with Fordham.
Crowley’s bunch fell on the road to the Rams earlier this season, giving them their first win in A10 play. But more than some of the other losses his team has suffered, that loss in the Bronx left a foul taste in his mouth considering they had controlled the grand majority of the game only to let the result slip through their fingers at the very end.
But that loss was over a month ago, and through the month of February, a lot changes.
“They all kind of sting, but that one did sting a little bit more,” Crowley said. “We’ve talked about that a little bit, but they’re not the same team right now. We’re not the same team. It’s about how well we play tomorrow, how well we execute. The last four halves, we have not played our best basketball. I think we’ve had some moments, but we’ve got to make sure we’re playing a little bit better, getting ready for March. And I expect we’ll do so.”
The biggest difference within Fordham going into round two is the presence of Alexis Black, who was injured in the first meeting. Black leads the Rams in scoring, averaging 16.8 points per game and has remained the team’s top scorer despite playing eight games less than the Lakresha Edwards, who averages the second-most points per game on the team with 7.0.
“We can’t worry so much about her that we give other people easy scores,” Crowley said of Black. “We can’t let her get rolling. She tends to score them in bunches. They play a lot of ball screen stuff, and all of them go to the basket really hard. So, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t give away fouls. … We’ve just got to execute better, and we’ve got to make people beat us with something they’re not as good at. Fordham is really good at getting to the basket, they’re really good at capitalizing on turnovers. So, if they’re going to get us, let’s make them get us in a different way.”
One of the ‘others’ that Crowley is wary of having a big impact is Emma Wilson-Saltos. Having scored a joint-game-high 16 points last time out, all of which came from tough buckets underneath, her physicality is something the Bonnies will need to key in on.
“You better be early, because if you’re not, her physicality is going to overtake you, which it did against us,” Crowley said. “I think she had 16 points in the first game against us, all layups and free throws. They got to 66 points because we gave them a lot of layups and more free throws than we should have. So, we’ve got to be aware early so that we can win some physical battles, and we got to be to where we need to be early so that we don’t allow them to get downhill to the rim as much as they did in the first game.”
With a win, St. Bonaventure will secure a bye in the first round of the Atlantic 10 Women’s Championship. With a loss, they can still receive a bye, but only if Saint Louis loses to Davidson in its final game of the season.
St. Bonaventure will tip-off against Fordham at 1 p.m. on Feb. 28 in the Reilly Center.
