When the Boston University men’s basketball team left Agganis Arena on Saturday following a 70-62 win over Canisius College, its status in the world of college basketball, for all intents and purposes, was exactly the same as it was a few hours earlier when it arrived at the Greek for warm -ups.
The Terriers’ final home game of the regular season was against a non-conference opponent at a point in the year when conference games are the only contests that have a tangible effect on BU’s postseason trajectory.
Even after the bout, BU still finds itself stamped with a 10-4 America East Conference record. It still sits squarely between University of Vermont and University of Maine in the conference standings, a position that likely will not change, and it still faces a route to the NCAA tournament that would require an AE championship.
The AE tournament is arranged entirely based on conference performance, and even in the case of a tie between two teams’ conference records at the end of the regular season, the deadlock is broken based on head-to-head records between those two teams. In other words, an AE team’s non-conference record is worth nothing when it comes to the postseason.
Considering the circumstances, the 40 minutes of tough basketball that the Terriers played against the Griffins this late in the season could be deemed a wasted effort. But BU coach Patrick Chambers didn’t look at it that way.
“I really enjoyed this game,” Chambers said following the win. “I really enjoyed preparing for it. [Canisius is] a very aggressive team. They are an older team. They have five seniors. They are a physical team, and they are a tough team. I wanted to see where we were. [I wanted to see if we] are as tough as them or tougher than them.”
The game, one of 57 in the yearly Sears BracketBusters event, served as a litmus test for the Terriers as it allowed them to play against a team with a similar overall season to theirs. BracketBusters matches up teams with similar RPI rankings, and the statistics at the end of the game showed just how evenly matched the two teams were.
BU finished with a 44 percent shooting clip compared to Canisius’ 40.8 mark, and while the Golden Griffins came away with a 32-31 victory in the battle of the boards and a 16-15 edge in total assists, BU committed 12 turnovers to the Golden Griffins’ 14.
Ultimately, the Terriers pulled away from the tight battle because of a 7-of-9 mark from the free throw line in the final minute of play. Until that point, however, the game was tightly contested, as neither team held more than a two-possession lead in the first 19 minutes of the second half.
Asked about how he kept his team focused at the end of the regular season going into games with little to no visible effect on the post season, Chambers was clear that he views every game as an opportunity to improve, regardless of its effect on record or seeding.
“I don’t even talk about [the postseason] with my guys,” he said. “All I say is, ‘we need to get better. We need to be the best team we can be at the end of the year.’ That is all we are concentrating and focusing on. I want to win the next few games. We had been under .500 for so long. It’s nice to be over it, now let’s keep going. We still have a lot of room for growth.”
While BU’s win on Saturday did not have visible implications on the rest of the season, the intangible value is considerable.
Not only did the game solidify a perfect 8-0 home record in 2011, it stretched BU’s season-best win streak to six games. It also marked senior forward John Holland’s final regular season game on Commonwealth Avenue, allowing him to finish his career at home on a high note in front of 875 fans (BU has gone 37-18 so far at home in Holland’s four years).
While a loss to the Golden Griffins would not have shifted the Terriers’ ranking, it certainly could have affected the team’s confidence heading into the postseason. Instead, BU found itself one of only two America East teams with wins in BracketBusters games on Saturday, and while its six-game winning streak lives on, Vermont’s 10-game streak was snapped in a loss to the College of Charleston, 85-70.
While an injury to a key player in a game with little playoff implication would have been devastating, the risk of playing with intensity proved worthwhile for Chambers, who was also able to use the game as practice for the remainder of the season.
“I knew what it was going to be, and I’m glad this game happened because I don’t want it to happen [against Binghamton on] Thursday,” Chambers said, referring to some of the mistakes that his team made during the game.
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