By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
The Hawk Will Never Die- but on the off chance it does, it will perish while shooting 3-pointers.
The St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team has returned home from an unconventional three-game road trip, but the Bonnies face more challenges from the perimeter when Saint Joseph’s and Davidson visit the Reilly Center over the next four days.
3-point shooting has been the Hawks’ meal ticket, with 37.8 percent of their total points coming from beyond the arc. Redshirt senior Taylor Funk leads the conference with over three 3-point makes per game, including an 8-of-10 performance to top Georgetown in November’s Wooden Legacy tournament.
The Bonnies yielded 30 3-pointers on the road trip, including 15 in Wednesday’s loss to George Mason. They have been outscored from 3-point range in all but one game this season (Clemson) and have allowed 10 or more triples in four of the last six contests.
Bona coach Mark Schmidt explained that his defense needed to “do something with (Josh) Oduro” on Wednesday, opting to double the 6-foot-9 junior nearly every time he touched the ball. Oduro nevertheless scored 15 points on 5-of-9 shooting and dished a season-high four assists to sharpshooting teammates.
The Hawks added an inside presence this season when Ejike Obinna transferred as a graduate student from Vanderbilt. Obinna is averaging 12.5 points per game on 59.3 percent shooting and has already made more field goals (96) this season than he did over three seasons at Vandy (85).
Schmidt said SJU’s 3-point proficiency will not alter the strategy of doubling down low.
“It’s just when to go,” Schmidt remarked. “You’ve gotta time it up and we didn’t really do a great job of timing it up. But no, we’ve gotta do a good job trying to keep the ball out of the post. … And when it goes in the post, trying to time it up: when to go and when not to go.
“We didn’t do a great job (against George Mason), but Oduro’s a heck of a player, maybe the best big guy in the league, so you have to try to pick your poison against him. But we’re gonna do the same thing as we always do, try to go when we can go and time it up, try to steal a ball when we can.”
Obinna is an inside presence Joe’s has lacked since Billy Lange took over for Philadelphia legend Phil Martelli, but Funk and sophomore Jordan Hall attempt over 10 field goals a game and are a defense’s main focus.
Bona is very familiar with the 6-foot-8 Funk, who is set to play his sixth game against SBU. Funk and Cameron Brown shared the team lead with 13 points apiece last time they played in the Reilly Center, performances overshadowed by Bona guard Jaren Holmes’s 38-point showing.
A hit-or-miss player against Schmidt’s defense, Funk is compiling his most efficient collegiate season, with better true shooting and effective field goal percentages (.623 and .591, respectively) than his previous campaigns. This is due in part to the 6-foot-8 Hall, who is averaging a shade under five points more per contest than he did last season.
Few have more of an effect on their team’s chances than Hall, who has helped the Hawks to a 5-4 record when he records a double-double; they are 9-21 otherwise. After a whirlwind summer of 2021, when he first decided to transfer to Texas A&M before opting to enter his name in the NBA Draft and ultimately chose to return to Joe’s, it’s worth wondering where the Hawks would be without his talents.
Hall is the league’s only player who ranks in the top 15 in scoring (15.2 points per game, tied for 11th), rebounding (6.9 rebounds per game, tied for 11th) and assists (6.5 assists per game, second). He is eighth in the country in assist rate, the tallest player in the top 10.
“He does it all,” Schmidt said of Hall. “He’s really improved his shot. He’s got a really good feel, good IQ for the game. He’s a great distributor. He played great last year, but statistically, he’s shooting the ball better this year from beyond the arc.”
Bona has won 13 of its last 14 against the Hawks, the lone defeat a confounding result at Hagan Arena on Jan. 6, 2018. That Bonnies team was mired in a slump much like the current group, a poor start to conference play belying massive preseason expectations.
Schmidt said on Wednesday that the Bonnies need to “get back to being that blue-collar team, not the pretty team but the team that plays the hardest.”
Asked about those comments on Friday, the 15th-year coach clarified that his team is still sharing the ball and doing what it needs to offensively. The defensive side, in which Bona has regressed from a top 20 defense nationally to a middle-of-the-pack unit currently according to KenPom, is where Schmidt wants to see improvement.
“We haven’t been as consistent as we want to be, but we haven’t gotten away from it,” Schmidt commented. “Offensively we’re still sharing the ball, getting the ball to the paint, doing all that stuff. It’s more defensively, trying to keep the ball in front of us.
“That’s what we’ve struggled at, trying to keep the ball in front of us and being harder on the ball, being more consistent on the ball. That’s what we’ve gotta get better at.”
Always a great job reporting on St. Bonaventure