By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
The seeds for this rubber match were planted in a typical postgame exchange between two competitive, prideful guards.
St. Bonaventure’s Kyle Lofton and VCU’s Bones Hyland did an about-face on the way to their respective Siegel Center locker rooms on Feb. 12 and got some parting shots in. Lofton was shown on camera barking in the Rams’ direction, while coaches and a game official stepped in to separate Hyland from inching closer to the fray.
Lofton walked away with a message in the form of two pointer fingers: “It’s 1-1.” Each team defended its home floor with a victory, Bona via second-half knockout in the Reilly Center and VCU by three in Richmond. The truest way to settle the season series would be a rematch in the Atlantic 10 Tournament.
The tiebreaker only took a month to come to fruition. The Bonnies and Rams will vie for bragging rights during Sunday’s A-10 Championship Game in Dayton, a 1 p.m. contest to be broadcast nationally on CBS.
The league finalists entered the postseason as the A-10 Tournament’s No. 1 and 2 seeds and breezed through their respective draws. Bona defeated Duquesne by 16 points in last Friday’s quarterfinal before routing Saint Louis by 18 on Semifinal Saturday. VCU led Dayton wire to wire in the quarters before its 64-52 semifinal win over Davidson.
Hyland, the A-10 Player of the Year, scored 30 on the Flyers. All five Bonnies scored in double figures against the Dukes. Each team shook off a regular season finale defeat to win two games at Siegel Center and both can claim they’re playing their best basketball in March.
One game separates them in the win column and over 3,000 fans are expected to attend the final, the highest attendance of the A-10 season. So excuse these two for showing some more competitive fire on Sunday.
“I’ve been to many championships but I never was able to cut down a net,” Hyland said Wednesday.
“It would just be ultimately a great feeling, and truly a blessing,” Jaren Holmes remarked. “It’s been a rough last two weeks for this university and this community with (university president Dr. Dennis) DePerro’s passing, but as a team, it would just be a great uplift for the school and the community.”
In a tournament that’s seen “chalk” results, with 10 of the 12 games being won by the higher seed, the title game could be decided by the “erasers.” Two of the conference’s top three scoring defenses play for the automatic bid, and the Feb. 12 matchup resembled a rock fight.
Defensive Player of the Year Osun Osunniyi will draw significant attention, but Hyland and Ace Baldwin have combined to post about four steals and eight rebounds a game, standing second and third in the conference’s defensive win shares metric. The Rams have held 10 of their last 11 opponents under 70 points since being on the wrong end of a 45-14 second half in Olean.
“We’ve gotta rebound,” Rams coach Mike Rhodes commented. “We’ve gotta find ways to get extra shots; we’ve gotta find ways to limit them. But we’ve gotta rebound, and I thought that really helped us when we played them (in Siegel Center). It’s helped us in all our wins this year; that’s a huge deal for us.”
The Bonnies’ 25-6 run to open the second half in Game 1 was VCU’s biggest takeaway as it recalled the regular season series with the media. The Rams’ seven-minute skid to relinquish the lead including five turnovers. Their offense never recovered, missing 21 of 26 second-half field goal attempts as Bona ran away with the victory.
The Rams redeemed themselves after that, winning nine of the last 10 games they led at halftime. That included the meeting in Richmond, when Dominick Welch’s 3-point try to force overtime didn’t fall and Bona never took a second-half lead despite thinning the margin to three points on multiple occasions.
“I just thought we kept our composure the second game compared to the first game. Of course, that’s quite obvious,” Rhodes commented. “But as we moved along in the year, I think we got better in late-game (situations); we’ve gotta continue to do that. If it’s a close game and we have the lead, know time and score. If we don’t have the lead, don’t panic; just keep playing the right way.
“I just think watching both of those games again this week and preparing for St. Bonaventure, we’ve still gotta be us with having great respect for them. Because they’re gonna do what they do, what got them where they’re at. We’ve gotta make sure we play with great poise and great toughness.”
For SBU, limiting turnovers is being emphasized as always.
In each matchup, the Bonnies turned the ball over 10 times in the first half before chopping that number in half over the final 20 minutes. The improved ball security they have shown late in games assures Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt that although Rhodes’s defense is challenging to simulate in practice, although the Rams have quick athletes who live in transition, his team is capable of keeping possession.
“They’re a really aggressive team. You can’t turn the ball over against them,” Schmidt said. “Once you turn it over against them, now they’re on the break and they’ve got really long, athletic guys and it’s hard to guard in an open court when they have numbers. We did a decent job of taking care of the basketball and really attacking when we have the opportunity. When we didn’t, pull the ball back and run some offense.”
Closing the game is, of course, squarely on the minds of the Bonnies who competed in the 2019 championship against Saint Louis. Bona held an enviable position with a 15-point lead with 3:34 remaining in the first half and a nine-point advantage at halftime, but 6-of-23 field goal shooting the rest of the way spelled doom.
The young freshman nucleus of Lofton, Osunniyi and Welch clung to a one-point lead with 11:02 to play but found a heavy scoring drought (five points in 13 minutes) difficult to overcome.
The Bonnies didn’t get a chance at redemption last year due to COVID-19 but are back in the title game again. Finishing this afternoon on a ladder, cutting down a net, is top priority.
“That’s the one thing that we didn’t do my freshman year: we didn’t finish,” Osunniyi noted. “The whole entire time leading up to the game this week I’ve been seeing a bunch of stuff on TV and all over about how Saint Louis, they won the game, and they showed the clips from our game freshman year. That’s just giving us extra motivation; we’ve gotta finish the game.
“As coach always says all the time, finish the season strong. So we’ve gotta finish the season strong on Sunday.”
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