George Mason won’t be the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team’s preferred destination for the first round of the Atlantic 10 Tournament.
The Bonnies competed with Mason more than they did on Jan. 31, but the Patriots used another standout effort from UConn graduate transfer Natalie Butler to complete the season sweep, 78-63 on Sunday afternoon. It was the Bonnies’ 20th loss of the season (7-20, 2-12 A-10), the Patriots’ 21st win (21-7, 10-4)
Butler scored 23 points and grabbed 24 rebounds to extend her double-double streak to 27 games in front of 1,544 fans at EagleBank Arena. Nicole Cardano-Hillary turned in another stellar performance as Butler’s sidekick, scoring 19 points on 7-of-13 shooting as well as dishing out four assists and swiping three steals.
SBU cut the lead to nine (67-58) with three minutes remaining but couldn’t draw any closer. GMU committed 19 turnovers, a glaring number that turned inconsequential when Bona scored as many points off the miscues as Mason did off SBU’s 11: 10 points off turnovers apiece.
“We won some loose balls where we got deflections and actually won the steal, which was a really, really positive thing,” Bonnies coach Jesse Fleming said. “We double-teamed the post and forced Butler into six turnovers because we were there and flying around. To me that shows that we’re playing defense with a little more energy than we have been. That’s a very, very encouraging thing.”
Four Bonnies scored double-figure points: Arielle Harvey had 16, Mckenna Maycock (five three-pointers) and Mariah Ruff recorded 15 each and Danielle Migliore scored 10.
“Arielle shot the ball really well … was really, really aggressive,” Fleming said. “And then Mckenna really shot the ball well… people were setting her up. Mariah did a good job of setting teammates up, and then had kind of a workmanlike double-digit performance. It was good to see four people in double figures.”
Migliore’s performance was an assuring sign for a team that desperately needed another scorer in the backcourt. It was her first game with 10 or more points since Jan. 20.
“D(anielle’s) still been rebounding, which is a good thing,” Fleming said. “She’s really had to struggle shooting the ball. We’re a different team if she can get to double-digits, being a third scorer for us. She was still a little volume today; she had 10 points on 12 shots. She can be better than that.
“She’s had to work really hard because people have adjusted to her; she had a good non-conference.”
After a nightmarish first quarter where SBU was outscored 20-6 and missed 15 of its 18 field goal attempts, the brown and white were only outscored by a point the rest of the way.
In the end, Butler was the star, as she has been in the majority of Patriot games this season. She only made five of her 14 shots from the field, but two of them were threes and she also made 11 of her 12 free throws.
The 6-foot-5 Fairfax Station, Va. native has made Mason a team no one wants to face in the A-10 Tournament. Unfortunately for Bonaventure, that may be the case; the 13-seed in the conference tournament plays at the four-seed in the first round, and guess which teams occupy those slots?
If there’s a third go-around, Fleming chooses to look at the positives, the aspects that make his team dangerous.
“I think this is a team, knock on wood, that we can score against,” he commented. “It’s a team that we can play our drive-and-kick game; we’ve made a lot of threes against them. I don’t think they enjoy guarding the way we play. So offensively, it’s a game that I’d be okay playing again. It’s just defensively, we’d really have to figure out a way to either limit one of their role players… or limit Cardano-Hillary, because we’re just not gonna stop Butler unless we constantly score on her.
“It wouldn’t be a terrible matchup, so we’ll see how that plays out.”
