ST. BONAVENTURE — While the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team may be 6-0 for the first time in over five decades after its win over Bryant, coach Mark Schmidt is blocking out all the noise and is urging his players to do the same.
But still, he acknowledged there were a number of positives to take from his side’s victory over “the best team that (they) have played so far.”
The Bonnies defeated the Bulldogs 85-70 at the Reilly Center on Saturday to match the best record to start a season since 1973, but the key to extending the streak will be consistency, Schmidt said.
“We got off to a great start, got up by 20, and then we just went into a little bit of a funk,” the 18th-year coach said. “That’s something that we got to try to prevent. We need to have more consistency. And our offense isn’t going to be perfect all the time, but our defense has to be there. When you’re not scoring, you better defend. And we stopped defending for 5-6 minutes. Give Bryant credit, they cut into the lead, and think it was at six at halftime.”
The Bona offense was on fire out of the gate. For a team that Schmidt described as “not a shooting team” the Bonnies were draining shots at a 72.7% tick and were 5-for-6 from deep through just over the first 16 minutes. To this point, co-captain Melvin Council Jr. had not missed a single shot, going 8-for-8 from the floor.
Council finished with 18 points, five rebounds and two assists.
However, at the center of it for the Bonnies was Noel Brown, who recorded his career-high with 22 points to go along with a game-high seven rebounds. The size advantage he sported on the floor paid dividends and was a big part of the game plan.
“Coach had let me know before (the game) we gotta go inside,” Brown said.
“You gotta dominate inside, you gotta score inside … they’re going to double, they’re going to do all this kind of stuff, you gotta be able to finish.’ So this past week, we were just preparing for Bryant and one of the main emphases was getting inside.”
Schmidt praised his big man and credited the way he has adjusted to taking center stage after having been looked over for that type of role throughout his collegiate career.
“I (think) he’s playing well,” Schmidt said. “Noel’s got to do that physical stuff. He has the body to get 22 and seven with four offensive rebounds, a plus-20. Noel’s getting there. He was never the go-to guy when he was at (George Washington), he was never the go-to guy last year. But he’s learning that role and he’s embracing it. He’s getting better, and we need him to do that.”
However, Bona’s good times did eventually sputter out, notably towards the end of the first half when the offense dried up and Bryant took full advantage.
In the last three minutes of the first half, the Bulldogs chipped away at a 20-point Bona lead to bring the scores within six going into the break.
Luckily for Schmidt, a halftime talk was seemingly all the Bonnies needed to restore the offense, as they rattled off an 18-4 run to open the second half and won a critical portion of the game.
“I thought our guys did a good job of talking about what we needed to do in the second half,” Schmidt said. “Coming out in the first five minutes of the second half was critical. I thought we took control of the game there, and it was just back-and-forth. We got to get better (with) end-of-shot-clock stuff, we got to do a better job rebounding. We had 13 turnovers, which is unacceptable, but in the last three minutes, we executed decently, not perfect, but we did a decent job there.”
Schmidt’s call for consistency was not limited to the scoring front. His team managed to dominate in the paint, scoring 46 points — more than half the team’s total — but lost the battle of the boards. This mostly came down to the 14 offensive rebounds the Bonnies conceded. To this, he credited the “power point guards” that the Bulldogs had in Earl Timberlake and Kvonn Cramer, the latter finishing with 17 points and seven boards.
“The thing that (Timberlake) does a good job at is rebounding his own miss,” Schmidt said. “He had a number of them. We just got to do a better job. It’s something we need to work on. We just can’t get out-rebounded. That’s one of the things that we take pride in.”
LaJae Jones and Chance Moore added 13 and 12 points, respectively, for Bona, which had six players tally eight points or more.
“We’re not going to have one guy,” Schmidt said. “If you look at the first couple games, Chance was the leading scorer, and today it was Noel. It’s always going to be someone different. I think that’s the strength of our team. We don’t have that one guy that’s going to get us 25 every night. We’re going to do it collectively, and it’s good to see that we have different guys stepping up on different evenings.”
Schmidt will look for continued improvement as Bonnies’ next game will be their toughest so far this season, against Utah State in the first game of the NIT Season Tip-Off Tournament, held at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at the Walt Disney World Resort on Thanksgiving night.
The other two teams joining the Bonnies and the Aggies in Orlando are North Texas and Northern Iowa.
