By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
Everyone, it appears, is weighing in on the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s recent struggles. ESPN commentator Jay Bilas remarked on the ML Sports Platter podcast that the Bonnies “don’t look like they’re playing with the same edge” as last season’s Atlantic 10 championship team, comparing them to Alabama. Bonaventure great Sam Stith wrote, in part, in a Facebook group yesterday that “instead of slowly bringing the ball and getting defense time to set… pitch out and run which will create better shots.” The team is now ranked 102nd on KenPom.com, sixth in the conference.
Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt, whose mantra has always involved ignoring the noise around his program, denied that a 4-4 start to league play has led his team to reconsider its approach.
“That’s what you do: just keep on working,” Schmidt said, “and that’s what we’re doing. We’re not gonna make drastic changes. What we’ve done has been successful and we just keep on doing what we’ve done. We’ve just gotta get better at it.”
A home matchup with Fordham on Tuesday night is, at least on paper, a “get-right” spot for a Bonaventure team seeking to end a two-game losing streak. The Rams are improved, having already eclipsed last year’s A-10 win total, but have lost six of their last seven contests and are 1-4 in the league away from Rose Hill Gymnasium. Bona has won five consecutive home games over Fordham and 10 straight overall, its longest win streak against any conference opponent.
Fordham’s league wins have come at La Salle in its A-10 opener and Rhode Island last Tuesday. Youngstown State transfer Darius Quisenberry is one of the conference’s three leading scorers and has averaged 20.4 points over the last five games. Forward Chuba Ohams, the A-10’s rebounding leader, is one of 15 Division I players averaging a double-double.
The Rams hired Kyle Neptune, previously a national championship-winning assistant at Villanova, as their new head coach last March. Neptune and his staff, which includes two-year Bona assistant Tray Woodall, are a win away from matching the 11 wins Fordham amassed over the last two seasons.
“They play hard,” Schmidt assessed. “They’ve got some very good players, some transfers, but if you look at them, they play really hard. That’s a testament to the coaching staff and to those players. They’re really competing.”
Fordham is two games clear of the league basement (that distinction currently goes to 1-7 Duquesne) despite looking up at all 13 teams in team field goal percentage. The Rams have instead crashed the boards to gain second chances, averaging 12.2 points second chance points in games they either win or lose by five points or fewer. Only Bona center Osun Osunniyi has averaged more offensive rebounds a night (3.1) than Ohams (2.9).
The last time Bonaventure suffered a defeat to Fordham was March 9, 2013, a shocking disappointment for a Bonnies team that needed only to win to make the 12-team A-10 Tournament. Avoiding a similar letdown will require a better rebounding performance than Bona’s loss to Richmond, when a pedestrian rebounding Spiders team won the rebounding battle 33-22.
“Every year you’ve gotta continue to work. No team stays the same,” Schmidt commented. “You’ve gotta continue to work hard so you can max out at the end of the year. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
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