ST. BONAVENTURE — Osun Osunniyi didn’t look like someone whose team nearly gave the game away.
He looked like a player whose squad had just played arguably its best offensive contest of the season. He looked like someone who’d just had his own best game of the year. He looked like a player whose team nabbed another big victory, regardless of how it came.
Joking alongside teammate Dominick Welch in the postgame press conference, ‘Shoon was all smiles. And why shouldn’t he have been?
THIS, and not the fact that a 15-point lead midway through the second half had been whittled down to two in the final minute, was the key takeaway. This, a sweep of Saint Louis at this stage of the year, was huge.
Osunniyi totaled 21 points on 9-for-10 shooting and Bona, until the end, had the offensive fireworks on display in dispatching the Billikens, 83-79, before 3,418 observers on Monday inside the Reilly Center.
THE WIN gave the Bonnies (15-7, 7-4) not just a massive home-and-home sweep of SLU, a Top 50 foe as of Friday, but their first three-game win streak since early December. It also pushed them to within a half-game of the Billikens (17-8, 8-4) for fourth in the league standings, with three more home contests to follow. Just as it always seems to do, Bona has officially made things interesting in mid-February.
And all of that was keyed by this: A tremendous first half in which Osunniyi dominated, it shot 57 percent from the floor and produced its second-highest scoring half of the season while bringing a 48-32 lead into the break.
“The first half, I don’t think we could have played better offensively,” coach Mark Schmidt acknowledged. “We were sharing the ball, we were cutting, we had great spacing. To be up 16 against a team with that talent says a lot about our guys.
“We got a little stagnant in the second half, but being up 16, sometimes that happens. But yeah, I thought we really shared the ball. Nineteen assists to five turnovers (for the game) is a heck of an offensive game.”
And it was spurred initially by Osunniyi.
THE 6-foot-10 senior had 11 points within the first six minutes and was a big part, behind a couple of alley-oop dunks, of a late 17-3 run that took the Bonnies from up one (27-26) to ahead by 15 (44-29) with 1:38 left in the half. And after being rendered almost invisible in last year’s road game against SLU, he’s had the Billikens’ number, averaging 14 points on an impressive 19-of-23 shooting and five blocks, all against a pair of hulking SLU forwards, over the last three games.
“The last 2-3 games, he’s done a really good job. (He’s been) much more aggressive, putting that shoulder into the guy’s sternum, and that’s what we need,” Schmidt said of ‘Shoon, before looking over at him and adding with a smile, “We need him to get more than three rebounds (his Monday total), but from an offensive standpoint, I thought he was terrific.”
And aside from 3-point shooting, so was Bona as a whole.
Welch piled up 19 points, including 12 in that big first half, six rebounds and four steals. Jaren Holmes continued to trend back in the right direction with 18 points on 7-of-14 shooting and Jalen Adaway had 17 points and six rebounds. Kyle Lofton, though he had only four points, dished out eight assists for the second-consecutive game.
BEHIND that effort, Bona managed to weather a 9-1 Saint Louis run out of halftime that trimmed its 16-point lead to just six (55-49) by ratcheting the advantage back up to 15 (71-56) with 9:34 remaining. Then the Billikens made one more run at it, turning what appeared to be a blowout Bona victory into a nailbiter in the final minute.
With 30 seconds left, SLU’s Fred Thatch hit a pair of free throws to bring the Billikens to within 81-79. Bona then got one of two free throws from Holmes, forced a miss on a potential game-tying 3 from Jordan Nesbitt and got an Adaway free throw with five ticks left to seal it.
“We knew they were gonna come back,” said Schmidt, whose team was hampered by a 5-of-11 effort from the line in the second half. “They’re well-coached, they got players. I thought we were a little lethargic coming out at halftime. We missed some foul shots, we didn’t finish the way we needed to, but thank goodness we had such a good first half.”
In the end, aside from its 83 points, Bona won in much the same fashion it did on Friday, forcing turnovers (this time 17), capitalizing on those by holding a head-turning 22-1 edge in points off giveaways and again owning the paint with a 58-30 edge in scoring. That offset a big night from Nesbitt, who went for 18 points, made 5-of-7 treys and was, at times, the only thing keeping this from being a 25-point game.
“That’s how we won out there,” Schmidt noted. “They have such a physical team, those areas are really, really important. Our defense has to get better, but from an offensive standpoint, from an effort standpoint, I thought it was really good.”
And now Bona, 5-3 against Top 75 foes this year, has its first true springboard since its three Charleston wins in November.
“They’re a really good team,” Osunniyi said of SLU. “Just to be able to get a win over them two games in a row, it’s good for us, it helps to get our confidence up. We understand that we can play well when we’re locked in and doing what we gotta do on the defensive end. It showed in the first half … but we know that if we play how we’ve been playing, we can be really dangerous and win games.”
