ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Jaylen Adams gazed over the Reilly Center court from his perch in Section 6, Row G, Seat 5.
It had been 52 days since he hit the game-clinching shot in the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s monumental NCAA Tournament win over UCLA, nearly two months since the Bonnies solidified a historic season, but this was the first time the 6-foot-2 point guard had truly taken time to reflect.
Now in the stands rather than on the floor, where a multitude of his forever moments — his 44 points against Saint Louis, his buzzer-beater against the Billikens in 2016, his duel with Davidson in 2018 — took place, his perspective was, quite literally, different.
“Twenty-six wins is crazy,” he said with a smile. “We’re in all type of record books; me individually. I’m more proud of the team stuff, though, honestly. By the end of the year, it was just really clicking. I’m proud of the way we really came together.”
Adams, the on-court architect of a season that ended with a school-record 26 wins and the program’s first Tournament victory in 48 years, lets his mind wander.
From the moment it arrived home from a 2-4 start in conference play, Bona took the mentality that it would need to win out the regular season to have any chance of making the Big Dance.
As it turned out, that was truer than most knew.
It’s almost bewildering now to think about the myriad of occasions — Adams’ game-winning 3 at Duquesne, the nip-and-tuck triumph over No. 16 Rhode Island, that iconic triple-overtime victory over Davidson — that Bona came through with its season very much on the line.
“There’s so many moments,” Adams said. “(Coach) Mark Schmidt told us at the banquet … if we lose one of those games, we ain’t in. So to know that, it was so many times we could have lost a game or just folded at any point in the season, and I just remember big moment after big moment. Not just for me, for everybody.
“Mobe’s bucket at Vermont, that’s a cold bucket. He didn’t have any points all game, and he hit a game-winning 3. We lose that game, we’re out. There’s just so many of those situations.”
Adams remembers the first goal he set for himself when he arrived at Bona in the summer of 2014. He wrote it down with his father at his side: Make the Atlantic 10 All-Rookie Team.
The Baltimore native fell short of that mark, though that was only because he missed the final nine games of the season with a finger injury, but an impressive freshman year instilled him the confidence that he could be a star.
Adams took another step every season, a growth augmented by the presence of Marcus Posley for his first two years and Matt Mobley for the latter two. By the end, he was not only the focal point of every opposing coach’s game plan, he was the playmaker on a team that desperately needed them over the final two months of the season.
In retrospect, it amounted to a lot of pressure for a 21-year-old, a stress compounded by the fact that multiple NBA scouts were in attendance almost every night.
He not only succeeded in that role, he thrived in it.
“Coach Schmidt just trusted me,” he said, “so he put me in a lot of good spots, and I think we just took off. My teammates believed in me. It’s easy to go out there and do what I do when you’ve got guys every day telling you to go do it and they’re looking for you to go do it. I think it’s a testament to them and my coaches.”
In his final game before the RC faithful, after fouling out in the second overtime against the Wildcats following a 34-point, five-assist performance, Adams was showered with a deafening standing ovation.
And if it wasn’t already, one thing had become abundantly clear in that moment: This was one of the program’s all-time bests.
Adams finished sixth in program history — and first among guards — in scoring with 1,912 points, and could well have made a run at No. 1 (Greg Sanders’ 2,238 points) if he hadn’t missed 17 games due to injury.
He now sits third all-time in assists (590), second in 3-pointers (270), seventh in steals (170) and, most importantly, first in wins (no class has been a part of more victories than the 86 accumulated by he and Idris Taqqee).
From his first game, the exhibition against Mansfield in November 2014, he wanted to be a difference-maker. Forevermore, he’ll be classified in the same category as Tom Stith, Bob Lanier and Andrew Nicholson.
“That’s a crazy feeling,” he said. “It’s just an honor to be mentioned with those names, honestly. I had goals every year, and coming in I just started checking them off one by one. Once I really got the first one, it gave me the confidence to just keep going.”
From where Adams is sitting now, the retired St. Bonaventure numbers are only a couple dozen feet away, hanging side by side in the rafters.
On this day, his 22nd birthday, he’s a bit more preoccupied with enjoying himself, with joining his now-former teammates for a pickup game with a visiting recruit. He looks to the ceiling, though, and agrees: One day, his number will be up there.
Any way you view it, Adams deserves to be among the bannered names in the RC. He’s one of just four players in program history to earn Associated Press All-America mention, alongside Stith, Lanier and Nicholson. He’s statistically one of the best player to don the uniform. He guided the Bonnies to the program’s first Tournament win since the Final Four campaign in 1970.
But what number would he prefer to see go up? The No. 10 he wore over his first three seasons or the No. 3 he displayed as a senior?
“I think No. 10 is like the foundation,” said Adams, who noted that he wanted to wait a year before taking former backcourt mate Posley’s number. “I had some big moments in No. 10 for sure. (But) I would want No. 3 to go up there because that’s the number I envisioned having since I was a little boy in college basketball.
“I think No. 10 is the foundation, but No. 3 — he’s a killer, he was cold-blooded. You definitely gotta put No. 3 up there.”
In the 52 days since Bona erupted in celebration inside UD Arena, Adams has done more looking ahead than behind.
It wasn’t until Izaiah Brockington announced his intention to transfer, when the reality that this team would no longer officially be together set in, that he and his teammates began truly thinking about what they accomplished in 2017-18.
Lounging in a RC red seat, he gushed about Courtney Stockard, who went from sitting for two straight years with a foot injury to one of the most integral members of the team. He talked about the strides that LaDarien Griffin has made over the last three seasons. He mentioned how proud of the team he was in his six-game absence, particularly in its ability to beat Maryland without him.
In October, the greatest guard in Bona history said that this was the only outcome for this season that he could envision.
He and the Bonnies will forever be able to say that they were that team.
“It’s something that we’re going to remember for the rest of our lives,” he said. “We’re going to be laughing about stuff from this season forever. I just look forward to seeing what’s next for them and for myself, honestly.”
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at othbutler@gmail.com)
