By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
TORONTO — Alejandro Vasquez doesn’t remember how his bow and arrow celebration started. The extra flair he adds to a big three-pointer comes naturally when he sees the ball catch nothing but net.
“Just something I do,” Vasquez said, beaming.
The air archery was on display at Scotiabank Arena on Saturday night as the freshman drilled three three-pointers and made eight of his 12 field goal attempts to lead all scorers with 20 points. Not far behind, classmate Justin Winston reached a career high of his own with 19 points on a 6-of-11 clip, swishing four of his five tries from beyond the arc.
You don’t have to go back too far to find a Bona freshman duo as potent on the stat sheet as Vasquez and Winston were against Rutgers; Kyle Lofton and Dominick Welch dropped 21 apiece in last year’s Atlantic 10 Tournament. But the frosh from Queens and New Jersey were able to score nearly half of their team’s points in just the fourth game of the season.
The rookies propelled a previously inept Bonaventure offense to a 43-point first half, which SBU used to sustain the Scarlet Knights’ second-half run and hold onto an 80-74 victory. The Bonnies snapped a three-game winless skid and improved to 1-3 in front of 6,802 fans, while Rutgers fell to 3-1.
“That was just the memo from the beginning,” Vasquez said of the aggressive start. “We wanted to come out with energy, just set (the tone) from the top.”
Bonaventure made 10 of its first 16 field goal attempts to jump out to a 25-13 lead after the first 11 minutes. Vasquez, Winston and junior Matt Johnson personally outscored Rutgers over that stretch, combining for 18 of those points.
The burst set the tone for the rest of the first half, as the Bonnies shot 59 percent from the floor including six threes. They held a controlling 43-30 lead as they bounced to the locker room.
“We played really well,” Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt commented. “Our freshmen really grew up; AJ and Justin played extremely well. As freshmen, you never know when the light’s gonna come out and the light came on today for both those guys. They couldn’t have played better, especially in the first half.”
Rutgers started the season 3-0 for a reason, however, and the combination of the Scarlet Knights’ renewed presence in the paint and a Bona shooting dip got Steve Pikiell‘s squad back in contention.
The Bonnies didn’t score for five minutes in the heart of the second stanza. After Welch’s three-ball at the 9:48 mark, they missed seven shots and allowed Rutgers to cut the lead to four before a crucial trey from Vasquez swung it back to seven with 4:36 remaining.
The Scarlet Knights weren’t done, however; a driving layup by Caleb McConnell brought Rutgers’ deficit back to four with a minute remaining. Once the Knights fouled enough to put Bona at the line with 30 seconds left (Rutgers committed 16 fouls to Bona’s 25), Lofton made three free throws and Vasquez added one at the stripe that, combined with two missed threes at the other end, secured Bona’s victory.
Lofton scored 17, a season high, while Welch added 11 and Johnson scored nine. The Bonnies scored 49.2 percent for the game (29 of 59), a season best.
McConnell led Rutgers with 13 points, while Myles Johnson added 12, Geo Baker recorded 11 and Akwasi Yeboah chipped in 10. But with the slow first half, and 11 missed free throws, Bonaventure simply made fewer mistakes than its opponent for the first time in 2019-20.
“We just needed to calm down a little bit,” Pikiell assessed. “We were rushing shots, we weren’t sitting down. We’re a real good defensive team; obviously you couldn’t tell that today. But we take a lot of pride in our defense. In the second half we kind of sat down and guarded them a little bit, but we had to scramble a little bit down the stretch to catch up…
“Every time they needed a timely basket they made it.”
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