By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
And now, we see if the St. Bonaventure Bonnies can avoid meeting expectations.
The Bonnies’ fifth place ranking in the team losing two cornerstone starters and featuring just one upperclassman with experience Atlantic 10 preseason poll was logical, maybe even a bit high, for a talented but young in a Bona uniform. A 4-0 start to league play, albeit against pedestrian competition, validated those expectations.
Now, landing in fifth would mean a loss at Saint Louis in the regular season finale. The Bonnies, like last year, are in position to earn the fourth seed in next week’s A-10 Tournament- and a double-bye to the quarterfinals- if they beat the Billikens.
Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt relishes situations like these. The only thing he would change about the situation is the location, preferring for a night this consequential to take place in SBU’s Reilly Center rather than SLU’s Chaifetz Arena. Bona (19-11, 11-6) has won four consecutive games at Chaifetz, but the Billikens are 14-3 at home this season and are riding the momentum of a four-game win streak.
“It’s been in our hands,” Schmidt said of his team controlling its destiny for the double-bye. “We don’t have to worry about anybody else doing whatever, wins or losses. We just have to take care of ourselves. That’s good, but we know that Saint Louis is a really good team that plays really well at home, and a veteran team. We’ve got our hands full.”
The buzzword around Bona from the time the St. Joe’s game concluded on Wednesday was physicality. Saint Louis’s roster is comprised of physical, athletic forces that pride themselves on winning with strong defensive efforts. The Billikens have kept their last six opponents under 70 points and have only allowed 67 points per league game.
Three A-10 players average double-digit rebounds and SLU features two of them: 6-foot-3 guard Jordan Goodwin, the conference’s leading rebounder at 10.4 a game, and 6-foot-7 forward Hasahn French, who grabs 10.1 boards a contest. The duo accounts for 26 percent of the team’s league-leading 1,194 rebounds.
Travis Ford’s group is 27th in the nation on the boards, including a No. 22 rank in offensive rebounds this year with 374.
“We know how Saint Louis plays,” Amadi Ikpeze remarked on Wednesday. “We know that they wanna go inside; we know that they attack the glass. So I think we just need to have that mindset of, we’ve gotta be the bully. We’ve gotta come in and punch them in the mouth, as Coach would say, from the jump. Just win that game and get the double-bye.”
“Yeah, I think (practice) is gonna be pretty tough,” Justin Winston added. “Coach is gonna push us hard, as always. We’ve just gotta keep working. We’ll be ready for it.”
St. Bonaventure has now finished in the A-10’s top five in each of the last five seasons. The Bonnies can do no worse than the fifth seed and no better than the four seed.
Schmidt recognizes how vital the double-bye is to winning the automatic bid in Brooklyn and has made it the team’s goal since conference play began in January. He also acknowledged that if Bona loses to Saint Louis and has to start play on Thursday, “it is what it is.”
“We just have to continue to find that consistency,” he said on Wednesday. “And that’s hard to do as a young player. Dealing with adversity, when things aren’t going well, you get a bad call or you take a bad shot or Coach takes you out, for young guys sometimes that’s hard to deal with.
“We had a lot of success (Wednesday) and hopefully it’s a good thing, but as I say, momentum is fleeting. As soon as the ball goes up against Saint Louis, it doesn’t matter what we did. We feel good about ourselves now, but when the ball goes up on Saturday at 7 o’clock it’s a whole different game.”
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