ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Kyle Lofton, wearing a t-shirt, flip-flops and headphones, peeled himself from a couch inside the trainer’s room.
Already the most unassuming player on the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball roster, the sophomore guard, who’d just been beckoned for a pregame interview, seemed particularly relaxed.
It isn’t that Lofton was any less bothered by last week’s 93-64 pasting at the hands of Davidson or that he isn’t fully enveloped by the urgency required for the final two weeks of the regular season.
It’s this: The Bonnies, at least as of today, are fine.
Despite that stunning setback, Bona (17-9, 9-4), with a tremendous and rather surprising amount of help during its bye week, sits in sole possession of fourth place in the Atlantic 10 standings, a game out of third, with a better than 75 percent chance of securing a “double-bye,” according to the KenPom metric.
It now has an opportunity to take hold of No. 3.
And that chance comes tonight, when Bona, in another matchup with big-time seeding implications, meets third-place Richmond (6:30 p.m., WPIG-FM, WHDL-AM, NBC Sports-TV) before a sold out, 80s Weekend audience inside the Reilly Center.
“Those games helped us,” said Lofton, referring to the A-10 outcomes from earlier in the week, “and I told my teammates, now it’s all on us. Everything is on us. (Those teams) did what they did, and it helped us, but we’ve just got to take care of business in these next couple of games.”
How eager are the Bonnies to take the floor after having to stew on a 29-point home loss for the last seven days?
“Losing isn’t good,” Lofton said, “but I’ll say that it helped us because we soaked it in for a whole week, so now we can’t wait for (tonight). All week we’ve been practicing for Richmond, getting better. So me and the guys, we’re excited to go out there (tonight) and play another game.”
From the get-go, most of the outside attention on the A-10, understandably, has centered on league leader Dayton, now up to No. 6 in the country, and Rhode Island. The team that has quietly been among the best in the league that you might not have heard as much about?
The Spiders.
At 20-6 (10-3), Richmond is still very much in the hunt for an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament and is listed as one of the “last four in,” per the latest bracket projection from ESPN’s Joe Lunardi. Coach Chris Mooney’s team has been playing especially well of late, having won five-straight, the last three by at least 15 points, including a head-turning 77-59 home trouncing of VCU.
Tonight, Bona will either secure a new biggest win of the year or suffer back-to-back February losses for the first time in five years.
“They’re experienced guys,” coach Mark Schmidt said of the Spiders, who have added talented Wagner transfer Blake Francis (17 points per game) and a healthy Nick Sherod (13 points) to all-conference-caliber players Grant Golden (14 points, 7 rebounds) and Jacob Gilyard (13 points, 6 assists). “They’re guys that have been in the system for two or three years.
“Golden’s probably one of the top three centers in the league; he can really pass it. (Nathan) Cayo, the (power forward) is vastly improved. They do a lot of good things, they know their system. They’re one of the teams that, at the beginning of the year, people in the business knew they were going to be pretty good.”
IN A resurgent year for Mooney and his team, Richmond has been one of the most offensively capable and efficient teams in the conference. And much like Davidson, whose motion offense caused major problems for Bona last Friday, the Spiders play a unique style for which the Bonnies will have to be prepared.
Different from the Wildcats, who play a three-man game, Richmond operates a Princeton-style set that runs through the center, Golden. For Bona, though, there’s a link between the two: being disciplined defensively.
“You have to guard Davidson a certain way and Richmond a certain way,” noted Schmidt, the second-longest tenured coach in the A-10, behind Mooney. “Guarding Davidson is different, so it’s not going to help us or hurt us. We’ve gone over their stuff … but just like Davidson, Richmond’s offense is hard to simulate in practice, so you try to break it down as best you can.”
Lofton, however, believes that having gone against one methodical offense just last week might be beneficial going into tonight.
“It’s good that we actually went against Davidson first,” he said, “because we’ve got a lot of young guys. To see that and for them to do what they did, I feel like now this week in practice, we just paid more attention and focused more, so now we know how to stay disciplined and solid when guarding that stuff.”
In the Spiders, who are 5-1 away from the Robins Center in league play, rank No. 50 nationally per KenPom and whose only A-10 losses have come to Dayton, Saint Louis and VCU on the road, Bona will be faced with perhaps its most difficult remaining contest, alongside a road matchup with SLU in its season finale.
But for Schmidt’s team, which has won three-straight against the Spiders, it’s a chance to bounce back in front of the home crowd in resounding fashion after falling so flat against Davidson.
“I would say we’re hungry and we’re excited,” Lofton said. “We kind of let our fans down (last Friday). This week, we just focused, we got better and we’re ready to put on a show (tonight).”
