By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
While Kyle Lofton was proverbially putting St. Bonaventure on his back on Sunday night, Osun Osunniyi was receiving treatment on his.
Osunniyi’s back ailment sidelined him for the entire second half of Sunday night’s win over Canisius. He played just 34 of 80 possible minutes last week after dealing with what Bonnies head coach Mark Schmidt called a “nagging” injury that has “been like that for a while” during his Siena postgame press conference.
St. Bonaventure is preparing to play three games in four days in the Charleston Classic, starting with 6-foot-10 Boise State forward Mladen Armus and potentially concluding with the rugged West Virginia Mountaineers.
The best ability for SBU in this week’s tournament, then, could be Osunniyi’s availability. Osunniyi has resembled his dominant 2020-21 season while he’s been on Bob Lanier Court; he trails Colin Castleton by just three blocks on the NCAA leaderboard despite logging 22 fewer minutes than the Florida Gator big man.
Any game without Osunniyi would be cause for concern in Bona land. Osunniyi missed seven full games in the 2019-20 season and the Bonnies lost six of seven games without him. He has played 20 or fewer minutes (while active) on 14 career occasions and the Bonnies are now 6-8 in those contests after the Canisius victory.
Bona was a starkly worse rebounding team with Osunniyi on the bench against Siena and Canisius, allowing eight offensive boards with the reigning Atlantic 10 Defensive Player of the Year on the court and 16 while he sat. A fifth of the points SBU surrendered in its opening games (22 of 107) came off second chances, the opposite of the one-shot stops (“kills”) Schmidt defenses take pride in.
Abdoul Karim Coulibaly has made more than half of his field goal attempts and is drawing the praise of his coaching staff. Osunniyi, however, has a 28.2 percent rebounding rate to Coulibaly’s 6.7 percent mark, according to Sports Reference. The Pitt transfer is making an impact on the offensive side of the floor, but the senior First Teamer’s impact is far greater.
“[Osunniyi’s] absence definitely does something to us, on the offense and defensive end,” Lofton commented.
Osunniyi’s propensity through two games has been to at least start the game, even if he is in too much discomfort to finish it. Though travel to South Carolina will be included on the team’s itinerary, the break between Sunday’s game and Thursday afternoon’s Charleston Classic opener could be advantageous for the center from a recovery and treatment standpoint.
The Bona program has experience playing, and winning, without a star player in non-conference tournaments. The Bonnies managed to defeat Maryland without Jaylen Adams in the 2017 Emerald Coast Classic before falling to TCU. Osunniyi himself played just 19 minutes in the 2019 Boca Beach Classic final against Florida Atlantic with a knee issue.
The Bonnies would, obviously, rather not chance another game with a limited Osunniyi.
“We need him on the court,” Schmidt remarked after the Siena game. “As much as Karim was a big positive for us tonight, we still need Osun. He’s a difference-maker, from a defensive standpoint. Makes up for a lot of mistakes that these guys make.”
Leave a Reply