By SPENCER BATES
ST. BONAVENTURE — Against Rhode Island on Jan. 10, the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team showed that it had the ability to compete with the best of the best in the Atlantic 10.
It was just a matter of finding a way to stretch positive minutes and halves into full game efforts.
Well, in the few days that followed, head coach Jim Crowley and Co. seem to have solved the puzzle as his team picked up a 57-48 win over Saint Joseph’s on Jan. 14.
The key to the win? A full-team, defensive effort.
“I just thought it was a really good team win,” Crowley said. “St. Joe’s is just so well coached, so talented and, as I told the team, they’ve been a standard of consistency. Some of our offensive numbers weren’t great but what we did do is we took really good shots and we played really good defense. We just had a lot of people make under the radar plays. … Our objective was to make them work on both ends and I thought we did that pretty well.”
The Bona offense is not highly ranked in the Atlantic 10. It averages 63.4 points per game (the third-lowest in the conference) and, in the two games prior to its win over St. Joe’s, it had scored 46 and 45 points, respectively. But they make up for what they don’t score by being extremely stubborn on the defensive end. On average the Bonnies hold teams to 58.9 points per game, a number good for third-best in the A10.
The Hawks had won five of its last six games against Div. I opponents, scoring 68.5 ppg over that stretch, including a 100-40 win over Le Moyne — a team the Bonnies beat by 13 earlier this season. But the great equalizer that the Bona defense is threw a wrench into its opposition’s game plan.
“We did it for 20 minutes Saturday against a high level team (in Rhode Island) and Joe’s is another high level team,” Crowley said. “We talked about it at halftime, we’ve gotten our chance, and we got lean on our defense. Shots will drop. … So I’m just really proud of that consistency. … Hopefully we understand how hard that is, how much you got to keep working at it, but how much it gives you a chance.”
St. Joe’s entered the game with the second-best average field goal percentage of any A10 team at just under 45%. Against the Bona defense, they did not record a quarter in which they shot over 29% and shot a combined 25% for the game.
The Hawks had just about no answer for the Bona defense, but where it did make up ground was off turnovers.
The Bona offense had a statistically good outing, shooting no lower than 40% in any quarter. They also had eight different players score at least five points. So while Aaliyah Parker and Laycee Drake did not run away with the scoring — granted they still recorded the two highest tallies of 11 and 10 points, respectively — it was because the ball movement was spot on all night.
“We just had great, great movement off the ball and had some great finds,” Crowley said. “Offensively, that’s why we got some pretty good shots. We were sharing the ball. … Our offense is built on spacing and movement. When we do that, we get pretty good looks.”
St. Bonaventure’s Laycee Drake (24) pulls up for a contested jumper against Saint Joseph’s. Drake scored 10 points for the Bonnies in the win. (Spencer Bates)
Drake noted that a well-balanced effort was exactly what Crowley was preaching in the days leading up to the affair and that how close the team is made accomplishing that goal all the easier.
“We can just lean on each other,” Drake said. “Coach talked about it being a team win, so we knew it was going to have to be very balanced until the buzzer sounded. So that’s what we were focusing on.”
But for all the good, there were some sloppy moments. Most notably, the 6:15 stretch at the end of the first half in which the Bonnies were out-scored 15-3. In that time, they turned the ball over numerous times as their red-hot start to the game was nearly wiped away entirely. Ultimately, they finished with 20 turnovers which the Hawks scored 21 points off of.
But according to Crowley, so long as they were able to get back to what they had been doing prior to the slump, they had a chance.
“We were getting tentative,” Crowley said. “We got to stay in attack mode and keep ripping and going. Aaliyah didn’t score in the first half, so we knew she’d get going. Then it was just about could we create some stuff from offensive rebounds, from defense to give us a few easy ones.”
There was a significant amount of whistles down the stretch that prevented either team from really establishing any sort of flow. But despite the repeated interruptions, Bona was the team that managed to get the better results out of the remaining minutes. That included a crucial 8-3 run in the dying moments which closed out the game.
“They deserve (all the credit),” Crowley said of his players. “There wasn’t a lot of flow, but we don’t mind playing that way. I thought we slowed down a couple times offensively, which stalled us a little bit. But I don’t think we slowed down defensively at all. We guarded. They earned everything, and I’m just really proud of our team effort to do that.”
St. Bonaventure will look to build on the positive result in its next game, an away affair at Fordham on Jan. 18 at 2 p.m.
