By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
Their season has found validation in the unlikeliest of places, the most defiant of fashions.
“They didn’t want us to get here,” St. Bonaventure head coach Mark Schmidt told his exuberant charges in the University of Virginia’s visiting locker room last Tuesday night. “But we’re here.”
This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill “nobody believes in us” speech to create a chip on your 23-year-olds’ shoulders. Bona traveled over 3,000 combined miles from the Reilly Center to its first three National Invitation Tournament destinations despite NIT organizers claiming a prioritization of regional travel. The Bonnies won 20 regular season games and compiled a 12-5 record in the Atlantic 10 Conference and were rewarded with true road games at Colorado, Oklahoma and Virginia.
The Big East, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference- three of the six “power-conference” leagues considered the class of college basketball- are sending team’s to the NIT Final Four. Bonaventure, the Vegas underdog in each of its previous three matchups, foiled a high-major invitational at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.
Bona was considered the most disappointing team in the conference just a few weeks ago after entering the season as a unanimous favorite and exiting with a stunning A-10 Tournament quarterfinal loss. The Bonnies would have preferred to play in the NCAA Tournament, of course, but have made the NIT worthwhile on the 45th anniversary of SBU’s last Garden title. They are now betting favorites for the first time this tournament as they host Xavier at 7.
Xavier, despite its reputation as a perennial Big East contender, has crafted its own redemption story as it returns to the Big Apple less than three weeks after it last played there.
The Musketeers, who were ranked in 10 of 16 Associated Press polls, missed the NCAA Tournament after losing five of their last seven regular season games and squandering a five-point lead over Butler with 2:30 remaining in the Big East Tournament. The school fired head coach Travis Steele the day after Xavier’s NIT first round win over Cleveland State, elevating assistant coach Jonas Hayes to interim bench boss.
Xavier re-hired Sean Miller, who coached the team from 2004-09 and won three A-10 regular season titles while the school was a league member, on March 19. Hayes continues to coach the team in the NIT.
Steele’s firing after the first round preceded point guard Paul Scruggs’s torn ACL in the Musketeers’ second round triumph over Florida. The fifth-year senior led the squad in assists and placed second in scoring. Xavier trailed by as many as 10 points in the second half of its quarterfinal game against Vanderbilt, but prevailed 75-73.
Before Xavier’s 1958 NIT title run, which included a semifinal victory over Bona, the team had lost 10 of its last 15 regular season games and the tournament committee asked if the Musketeers wanted to decline a bid. The program rebuffed, opting to participate, and cut down the nets. This year’s Musketeer season closely mirrors the ups-and-downs of that campaign, 64 years ago.
“It tells you how well the coaching staff has done, what type of kids they have. Character kids,” Schmidt, who was an assistant coach at Xavier from 1994-2001 under the late Skip Prosser, remarked. “They rallied, and that’s really, really impressive. For them to lose their coach after the first game and then have their starting point guard go down against Florida and still continue to win, that shows they’re a tight team.
“They’ve got quality young men and it’s really impressive.”
The void left by Scruggs’s absence has been filled in the starting lineup by sophomore Dwon Odom, a former four-star recruit who recorded four points, four assists and four rebounds against Vanderbilt, and on the score sheet by senior guard Adam Kunkel, who tallied 15 points against Vandy despite entering with an eight-point-per-game average.
Versatile big man Jack Nunge, meanwhile, is Xavier’s top scoring option as well as its defensive anchor. The 7-foot Iowa transfer, who left Iowa to be closer to his family after his father’s sudden passing in November 2020, averages 13.3 points and 7.3 rebounds per game and shoots 36.6 percent from 3-point range. An All-Big East Honorable Mention honoree, Nunge mixed power and finesse against Vandy by hitting two 3s, blocking three shots and finishing a nasty poster dunk over 6-foot-10 forward Quentin Millora-Brown.
The last five NIT Most Valuable Players have stood 6-foot-7 or taller, most recently Memphis’s Landers Nolley II. Nunge and Bona center Osun Osunniyi will certainly contend for the honor this week. Nunge would be just the second opposing starter listed at a taller height than the 6-foot-10 Osunniyi this season; Virginia’s Kadin Shedrick was the first. Osunniyi controlled that matchup, tallying 10 points to Shedrick’s eight and blocking four shots, including a potentially game-saving one as time expired, to Shedrick’s pair.
Nunge, Schmidt noted, is more of an outside threat and demands extra attention on ball screens.
“He’s both inside and outside; sometimes he’s more effective on the perimeter,” Schmidt assessed of Nunge. “He’s a screen-and-pop guy. It’s really hard to guard when a five-man is screening and popping. A four-man you can switch (the screen), but a five-man, it’s really really difficult. And he might be the best shooter on their team. He’s 7-feet.
“You switch (the screen), they take him inside and he’s long, he’s athletic. … He’s one of the reasons why they’ve had so much success and one of the reasons why they’re so hard to guard.”
The Musketeers have featured a different leading scorer in each of their three NIT games: Kunkel produced 14 points against Cleveland State; Nate Johnson tallied 16 against Florida; and Zach Freemantle posted 16 against Vanderbilt. They owned the 49th-most efficient offense according to KenPom.com and, like Bonaventure, rank in the top 50 nationally in assist-to-turnover ratio.
And Xavier, like Bona, has gained a reputation in the second half, including a 39-23 finish against the Gators. The Musketeers have scored over 38 second-half points a game this year.
“Good defensive team. They get out in the open court,” Schmidt stated. “They’ve got good size. They attack the paint. They’re in the Final Four for a reason; they had a heck of a season. I know at the end they didn’t play as well going down the stretch, probably the reason they didn’t get into the NCAA Tournament, but they’re as good as anybody.”
Xavier is still tied with Rutgers as St. Bonaventure’s 10th-most frequent head-to-head opponent despite the sides not meeting since the Musketeers escaped with a 66-64 victory in the Reilly Center on Jan. 16, 2013.
Bona is doing everything it can to make the Garden sound like the Reilly Center did for those classic A-10 matchups, literally sending students to New York by the busload. SBU alumni have raised more than $48,000 to supply eight coach buses carrying more than 420 students, while more still are driving down on their own dime.
Local fans gathered Sunday morning to send the Bonnies off to New York, while New York City-based alumni were waiting upon Bona’s arrival.
“I think that’s one thing when we probably talked about when the kids decided to play in the NIT, ‘Just imagine if we could get to Madison Square Garden, what the support would be like?’” Schmidt explained. “It’s exciting for them, it’s exciting for our program, and we’re really looking forward to it.
“You couldn’t ask for anything more.”
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