By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
The 2020-21 college basketball season was far less tense without St. Bonaventure and the University at Buffalo meeting in a sold-out Western New York arena on a December Saturday. The UB program’s COVID-19 pause canceled last year’s planned Dec. 22 matchup.
The meeting with the 6-1 Bonnies and 4-2 Bulls at the Reilly Center on Saturday was already going to be intense, but Kyle Lofton’s absence breeds an air of mystery and uncertainty. Lofton will miss multiple weeks with a high ankle sprain, according to multiple sources, and the Bonnies have to learn how to play without their Atlantic 10 First Team point guard, who has not missed a game in his SBU career.
Lofton is second to only Richmond guard Jacob Gilyard in the win shares metric among Atlantic 10 players since 2018-19, his freshman season, according to Sports Reference. Lofton is estimated to have contributed over 12 wins due to his play, as has classmate Osun Osunniyi. He has also been on the floor for 95.3 percent of possible minutes in his career.
“We have different things that we can do. We can go small; we can go big,” Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt acknowledged, without ever actually acknowledging that Lofton was out. “We shall see tomorrow.”
The Bulls made the Mid-American Conference (MAC) Championship Game and appeared in last season’s National Invitation Tournament (NIT) despite starting the season 6-6. Four of the five starters from that team return, while coach Jim Whitesell added George Washington transfer Maceo Jack, a double-figure scorer, to this year’s lineup.
Buffalo is tied for 14th in the nation in scoring offense, tallying 85 points a game including a 106-point outburst against Illinois State. The Bulls’ only defeats have come at then-sixth-ranked Michigan to open the season and in Cancun to Stephen F. Austin, a game they led with 2:06 remaining.
Ronaldo Segu scored 25 points in the Stephen F. Austin loss. The senior, who averaged just 2.1 points as a freshman, is now taking the second-most shots on the team behind Jeenathan Williams. Williams, a Rochester native, ranks tied for 52nd on the national scoring list with 18.8 points a game, which started with 32 points on 14-of-22 shooting against Michigan.
The Josh Mballa-Osun Osunniyi matchup helped decide the game the last time the teams met, UB’s 84-79 win on Dec. 30, 2019. Mballa, a 6-foot-7 forward who played with Osunniyi and Lofton at Putnam Science Academy, compiled a 14-point, 15-rebound double-double at Alumni Arena. Osunniyi, meanwhile, played just 17 minutes due to foul trouble and fouled out with 4:36 remaining.
Mballa has grabbed at least two offensive rebounds in each game this year and also made 3-pointers against North Texas and Illinois State, making him a threat both inside and on the perimeter.
“He gets the ball up top and drives it,” Schmidt noted. “He’s not a big post-up guy, per se. He’s more of a guy, catching it on the perimeter and driving it. But the paint is, like every game, the team that owns the paint is gonna be the team that wins the game, both by driving it and by rebounding the ball.
“Buffalo’s a great offensive rebounding team. They do a good job of going downhill offensively, so it’s the team that can control the paint is the team that’s gonna have more success.”
Redshirt sophomore Linton Brown returned to practice after missing Wednesday’s game with an illness. Bona will look to Brown for shot-making; an under-the-radar aspect of Lofton’s absence is his 9-of-20 mark from 3-point range over the last four games.
“We always want the more guys we can bring off the bench, the better,” Schmidt commented. “Hopefully he can make some shots for us; that’s what his strength is. So if he’s out there and he’s playing well, he’ll be a help to us.”
Bona is 10-4 in the head-to-head series and has won four of the last six contests. If SBU prevails, Schmidt says, it won’t be because his team engaged in a shootout with the up-and-down Bulls, who average over 75 possessions a night.
“We’re gonna play the way we’re capable of playing,” Schmidt said. “Offensively, we’re gonna try to score in the first 12 seconds of the clock and if we don’t, then we’ll try to run some offense. And defensively, we try to keep it in the half court. We want to force a five-on-five game defensively and we want to score in the open court. If they don’t, we have to execute our half-court offense.”
The game will be broadcast on the NBC Sports app.
Leave a Reply