By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
St. Bonaventure started Saturday’s home opener at the Reilly Center playing nearly perfect basketball.
Jaren Holmes’s first 3-pointer of the season gave the Bonnies a 30-7 lead over Hofstra 11:21 into the contest. Dom Welch was outscoring the Pride by three points by himself, pushing Bona to a 26-2 run after Tareq Coburn’s 3-pointer made the score 5-4 just under three minutes in.
And then, in Osun Osunniyi’s words, the Bonnies got “sloppy” and “really selfish” offensively. Kyle Lofton agreed, saying the team got “comfortable.” The Pride got as close as 11 in the first half and thinned that lopsided first 11 minutes to a 43-28 halftime deficit.
The second half was really where the “tale of two halves,” as coach Mark Schmidt put it, saw Hofstra make a furious comeback. A 27-12 run over the first 12:25 of the half, accentuated by Jalen Ray’s fourth 3-pointer of the game, tied the score at 55 with 8:35 remaining.
Bona withstood the challenge, surviving a 77-69 decision and topping the Pride for the second straight season.
Ray erupted for 19 second-half points, including five 3-pointers, to lead the Pride’s charge. Meanwhile, the Bonnies missed 12 of their first 15 shots in the second half and 20 of their 34 field goals overall in that period.
After a Ray 3-pointer cut the Bonnies’ lead to three, Osunniyi corralled a rebound and found a sprinting Welch in transition. Welch proceeded to miss a dunk, followed by Ray’s tying 3-pointer, after which Alejandro Vasquez missed an attempt to answer from deep. A Lofton layup assisted by Welch stopped the run, but Ray hit another long-range shot to give Hofstra a temporary lead.
“You knew they were gonna come back, but I didn’t know they were gonna come back (to take the lead) in the second half,” Schmidt said. “They outscored us by 27 at one point.”
The Pride led by as much as five with 6:08 remaining before Vasquez stopped the bleeding with a 3-pointer in front of the SBU bench off an assist from Osunniyi. All five field goals after that were assisted as the Bonnies got back to collaborating: Lofton found Welch for the go-ahead 3-point shot with 3:21 remaining; Osunniyi caught lobs from Lofton and Jalen Adaway; the defense allowed just three Hofstra points over the last 5:22.
Bonaventure will freely admit it wasn’t a pretty second half, but it did enough to earn its first 2-0 start since the 2013-14 season.
“I thought our guys collected themselves, didn’t hang their heads, and fought back,” Schmidt said. “Became more aggressive. ‘Shoon got in foul trouble (Osunniyi was charged with his third foul with 18:30 remaining), which hurt us, but I thought our guys dealt with adversity and made the plays at the end; got some stops and did what we needed to do to finish that game.”
Despite playing just 12 second-half minutes, Osunniyi scored 10 points in that span and finished the game with 14 points and 12 rebounds, his first double-double of the year. Lofton led Bona with 16 points and was an assist shy of a double-double himself. Welch ended with 15 points while Adaway and Holmes were on the cusp of double-digits with nine and eight, respectively.
Bench players (Justin Winston, Alejandro Vasquez and Jalen Shaw) produced 15 points after posting just six as a group last game. Even with a major second half slump, Bona still made 30 field goals for the second straight game to open the season.
While Schmidt acknowledged his team can’t lose 20-point leads, he was happy with how his experienced starters closed the game. The captains know the benefit of having been in similar situations before.
“It just falls back to veteran leadership,” Osunniyi remarked. “I got into foul trouble, so me, I’m just trying to be energy on the bench and just talking to guys. And then Kyle, he’s on the court. It all comes back to veteran leadership: experienced guys, veteran guys telling everybody to stay calm and run our offense and play defense.”
“As it got to the end, we knew it was go time,” Lofton said. “We couldn’t play laid-back, we had to be aggressive, so we had to attack the gaps, get in the lane, make plays. I think the veteranship, we knew that.”
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