With three straight losses and seven in its last 10 games, the Boston University men’s basketball team needed a spark. And as the team’s season slowly started to slip away, it only seemed likely that such a jump start would come from one of the Terriers’ go-to scorers, Kevin Gardner or Corey Hassan.
It didn’t.
Instead, it was the BU defense that stepped up, holding the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (8-14, 4-7 America East) to just 16 points in the first half last night. Offensively, Shaun Wynn led four Terriers in double digits to help BU (9-14, 6-6) cruise past the Retrievers, 59-47, at The Roof.
And the win not only planted the Terriers firmly back into the thick of the America East race, but it erased any bad memories of UMBC’s 65-64 overtime win against BU last month.
“We owed those guys something,” said Wynn, who finished the game with 17 points on 5-of-9 shooting, including 4-of-6 from beyond the arc. “After the last game and the way we lost we kind of felt irked about it. Everybody was just fired up and knew what we were playing for.”
The team’s energy showed from the very beginning, as the Terriers held UMBC to just six points in the first 10 and a half minutes of the game, including a five-minute scoreless drought that saw BU take a commanding lead with an 11-0 run.
“I don’t care where you are, if you can hold a team to 16 points in the first half, you’re playing pretty good defense,” said BU coach Dennis Wolff.
Meanwhile Wynn came out firing for the Terriers, scoring 13 of his 17 points in the first half, including three straight 3-pointers to close out the frame. But the senior co-captain wasn’t alone, as BU also got 12 points from junior guard Brian Macon, 11 from big man Omari Peterkin and 10 off the bench from freshman forward Ben Coblyn.
The contributions were more than enough to make up for the sluggish starts of Hassan, who went just 1-for-7 from the field, and Gardner, who played only six minutes in the first half after getting into early foul trouble.
Gardner tacked on another quick foul in the opening minute of the second half, and though the senior co-captain still managed to haul in 10 rebounds in only 20 minutes, he was never a force on the offensive end.
“Hassan and Gardner, I thought we did a pretty good job defending them,” said UMBC coach Randy Monroe. “You tell me that if we hold those guys under their numbers, I think we got a very good shot at winning the ballgame.”
And for a while, the Retrievers did. After falling behind by as many as 13 in the first half, Monroe’s squad clawed back, closing to within three with just under 10 minutes in the game. But BU responded, knocking down 13 of its 14 second-half free throws to stretch the lead back to double digits.
“The free throw shooting is a dramatic change,” said Wolff, whose team made 16-of-18 foul shots despite going into the game averaging only 63 percent from the line. “When you’re trying to get the ball inside the way we are, you have to be able to make some free throws. If you picture this game and we were 9-for-18, it’s a totally different game.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the Terriers were able to hold UMBC’s two leading scorers, John Zito and Brian Hodges, to just five points combined in the first half. And though Zito came out firing in the second half to pad his game total to 17 points, Hodges went over 36 minutes without a bucket, finishing with just a lone 3-pointer on the night.
Meanwhile BU held sophomore swingman Mike Housman, who torched the Terriers with 24 points in the teams’ first meeting, to just five points in the game.
“Last time I think those guys got a lot of easy buckets,” Wynn said. “That was the main emphasis on our game plan coming into this game, don’t let them get a lot of easy buckets, don’t let them beat us in transition. So I think just getting down on defense and guarding our men, that was one thing that was in the back of our heads because we don’t want to have another tough practice like after last time’s game.”
But tough practice or not, Wynn and the Terriers still have a lot of work to do. The team is now tied with the University of New Hampshire for fourth place in the conference, and though the first-place University at Albany is likely out of reach with only four games to play, BU still has a clear shot at a top-three seed in next month’s America East Tournament.
“The chips are going to fall where they may,” Wynn said. “But I know we have a good team and I know if we just continue to play the way we played tonight, I think we have a good shot to get a good seed and win some games in the conference tournament.”