By SPENCER BATES
batesoleanstar@gmail.com
ST. BONAVENTURE — Big leads are great. Keeping them is better.
The St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team finds itself 9-1 through the first third of the regular season. A record that has only been achieved once since the 1970-71 season. So, of course there are plenty of reasons to celebrate.
For one, Mark Schmidt’s work in this past postseason is paying off. Picked to finish in the bottom half of the table in the Atlantic 10 preseason poll, the Bonnies are posing questions for those who were selected to run the conference.
Having to replace an entire roster is no small feat, but the likes of Chance Moore, Melvin Council Jr., Dasonte Bowen and Jonah Hinton have made the transition feel much more smooth as opposed to a plunge into the deep end.
However, the Bonnies are not without their problems, no team is. But one area in which Schmidt will assuredly like to leave in the non-conference portion of the campaign is the team’s once-in-a-while struggle of retaining comfortable leads.
The first instance of such a theme was in Bona’s very first of the season against Div.III Alfred University. Its 11-0 start to the game was responded to by the Saxons with a 13-6 run, cutting the lead to just four in an exhibition affair that Bona has won in each of the last four years.
St. Bonaventure guard Melvin Council Jr. (11) looks to get up a shot against Utah State on Nov. 28 in the ESPN NIT Season Tip-Off Tournament. (St. Bonaventure Athletics)
In the Bonnies’ second road game of the year at Florida Gulf Coast, they held, at the minimum, a six-point lead for just about five of the remaining 10 minutes of the first half until six unanswered points from the Eagles cut the lead to just one point with under a minute in the half.
Against Div.II Mansfield, Bona was unable to push the lead beyond two or three possessions for the entirety of the opening half. Against Bryant University, it held a 20-point lead with just five minutes remaining in the first half before the Bulldogs cut the lead to six points entering the break. And, perhaps less worryingly due to the size of the scoreline, Bona’s 32-point second-half lead over Bucknell was cut to a 17-point victory.
“We got off to a great start, got up by 20, and then we just went into a little bit of a funk,” Schmidt told reporters after his side’s 85-70 win over Bryant. “That’s something that we got to try to prevent. We need to have more consistency. And our offense isn’t going to be perfect all the time, but our defense has to be there. When you’re not scoring, you better defend. And we stopped defending for 5-6 minutes.”
On the bright side, Bona ended up the victors of all aforementioned games. A feat in itself.
And this is not an every-game issue the Bonnies have on their hands. When it has mattered most, they have been able to finish on good notes and oftentimes it has come against the strongest opponents they have faced.
Against Utah State in the ESPN NIT Season Tip-Off Tournament in Orlando, Florida, Bona held the lead once — by a single point — prior to the final 2:25 of the first half. But it was in that final two and a half minutes that it went on a run to take a five-point lead into halftime against a team that was boasting the best field goal percentage in the entirety of Division I basketball at the time.
And while the game got away from the Bonnies in the second half for a bit, the 13-point deficit it stared down in the final three minutes of the game was cut to just a five-point loss which they had a solid chance of flipping on its head.
The very next day at the tournament, Bona swiped the lead away from the University of Northern Iowa in the last moments of the first half and carried it through for a solid win.
That is the kind of fight Schmidt likes to see.
St. Bonaventure guard Chance Moore (0) is closely guarded by a Utah State defender as he waits for the offense to get set up. (St. Bonaventure Athletics)
The question for the Bonnies is now this: With just three non-conference games left before A10 play tips-off, will they be able to leave those moments of content behind them?
The A10 is an unforgiving conference, hailed as one of the most competitive in the nation year-in and year-out due to its parity. So, if Bona wants to continue the run they are on and keep making those A10 preseason poll voters eat their words for picking them to finish 10th, it will need to keep its foot on the gas pedal and not let up, no matter the score.
The Bonnies will get another test against a top level opponent in their next game, a neutral site fixture against Providence in the Basketball Hall of Fame Showcase at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut on Dec. 14.
