By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
Wednesday’s St. Bonaventure-UMass game represents a homecoming of sorts for Massachusetts guard T.J. Weeks.
Weeks, a redshirt sophomore, was born in Olean while his father Tyrone Sr. was an assistant on Jim Baron’s coaching staff. Weeks’s birth even made it into the Associated Press, as his mother went into labor while Bona was en route to Cleveland for the 2000 NCAA Tournament. The team bus pulled over in Ohio and Tyrone Sr. drove back to Olean with an assistant who was following the bus in his car, making it back in time for his son’s birth before rejoining the Bonnies for their game against Kentucky.
“He said, ‘Coach, I need to go back,’” Baron told the AP. “I said, ‘You’ve got to go back. You’ve got a tougher coaching job than we do. We’re only worried about Kentucky.’”
The younger Weeks, like his father, has become a key contributor for the Minutemen. Tyrone Sr. scored 1,013 career points from 1994-98, filling the sixth man role on the “Refuse to Lose” team that made the national semifinal. T.J. averages 9.6 points for the Atlantic 10’s third-best offense and is the second-leading rebounder.
Tyrone Sr. averaged 17 points over his last three games at the Reilly Center, with the Minutemen winning each contest. This is Weeks Jr.’s first opportunity to play on Bob Lanier Court (7 p.m., ESPN+), as the teams did not play last year and the 2020 meeting took place in Rochester’s Blue Cross Arena.
UMass, in its fifth season of Matt McCall’s head coaching tenure, lost its first four A-10 games before scoring a 91-85 win over Saint Louis. The Minutemen have alternated losses and wins since that game and are currently tied for ninth in the conference standings.
The UMass offense, a balanced attack that features four players averaging double-figure points, was tied for 72nd in the nation in scoring average (75.7 points per game) entering Tuesday’s action. The Minutemen have reached 90 points on three occasions; Saint Louis is the only A-10 team with more 90-point performances.
The Minutemen sink over 10 3-pointers a night, shooting 38.7 percent as a team from beyond the arc. This is a dramatic change from the last two seasons, when they ranked in the bottom five of the league in 3s due in large part to star center Tre Mitchell scoring 792 points in two seasons. Mitchell’s departure to the University of Texas led to UMass welcoming Boston College transfer Rich Kelly, who makes nearly half of his 3-pointers to lead the conference (48.6 percent), and Albany transfer C.J. Kelly (no relation), who has made 36 of his 97 opportunities (37.1 percent) from deep.
Junior point guard Noah Fernandes, another former transfer who played the 2019-20 season at Wichita State, is the catalyst. Fernandes, a capable shooter himself with 32 3-point makes in 82 tries (39 percent) has improved his scoring and assist averages this year. He has tallied at least 20 points five times and recorded five or more assists in 10 contests.
“[Fernandes] draws so much attention from the defense that I think it alleviates a lot of pressure from the other guys on the court,” Kelly told the UMass Daily Collegian in December.
As good as the Minutemen are offensively, however, they have allowed the most points in the A-10 defensively. A few of their lowlights include allowing 91 points in a 20-point defeat at Yale and surrendering seven 3-pointers to Saint Louis’s Gibson Jimerson, Jimerson’s career high. They have held just five of their 23 opponents under 70 points, by far the worst mark in the league.
A Bona team that has reached the 75-point threshold four times in the last six games and put up 48 in the first half on Monday figures to be awaiting such a defense in earnest. Finding big man Osun Osunniyi, who totaled 33 points on 18 shots in the two-game sweep of Saint Louis, figures to remain a top objective.
“You want to score close to the basket,” Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt acknowledged after Monday’s win. “If we can get the ball inside and ‘Shoon can score, it makes the defense sink. And then it’s easier to shoot the ball from the perimeter, better spacing.”
Defeating UMass would give Bona its first four-game win streak since its 4-0 start to the season. The game is also SBU’s second of a four-game homestand, the “decline” of a difficult A-10 slate that began with four of five games away from the Reilly Center.
The Bonnies are in the midst of four games in nine days, a stretch Schmidt said the players enjoy because they would rather play games than practice. The 15th-year coach said it “may be a blessing, not just to us but to everybody.”
Osunniyi agreed.
“I guess it just keeps us active,” the senior commented. “Having long weeks of practice and having no games is kind of like, mentally, it’s draining. So I think for us, the downside is your bodies, but we’re young, as coach says, so we don’t need to worry about being tired. … We’re just enjoying playing the game, honestly.”
Leave a Reply