Seemingly reeling after losing four of its last five games and coming off a loss that coach Dennis Wolff called “one of the softest performances by a BU team in six years,” the Boston University men’s basketball team is falling fast, hoping for anything to catch them and stand them upright again.
Well, BU, meet Stony Brook University – the worst team in the America East.
Stony Brook comes into Sunday afternoon’s contest at The Roof in dead last in the conference with a paltry 2-11 record in league play. Its overall record (4-20) isn’t much better and is five games worse than BU’s (9-15, 6-7).
The Terriers, coming off Tuesday’s 74-51 rout at Binghamton University, are still trying to find themselves. Mired in an offensive drought for most of the season, BU’s usually stout defense abandoned them against the Bearcats.
Things were so dreary that Wolff elected to play most of his younger players for the majority of the game. Freshman Marques Johnson played a career-high 33 minutes and fellow frosh Brendan Sullivan played 13 minutes, the second most in his career. Point guard Brian Macon, on the other hand, played a season-low 20 minutes.
Kevin Gardner and Corey Hassan were once again the two main offensive threats, although neither broke the bank with a scoring deluge. Gardner dropped 12 point in 33 minutes and Hassan recorded 11 in 31. The only other Terrier to score over five point was Johnson, who netted nine.
For BU to avoid falling to the four-win Seawolves, they’ll have to get a little more production than that.
Guard Mitchell Beauford leads Stony Brook with 14.3 points per game (good for eighth in the conference) and 1.7 assists per contest. Junior forward Mike Popoko and senior Bobby Santiago carry the rest of scoring load. Popoko scores at a 10-point-per-game clip while Santiago is averaging 9.7.
The Seawolves as a team average 56.3 points per contest, a figure that puts them last in the league, only a shade under BU’s 56.8 average. But what could favor the Terriers is Stony Brook’s scoring defense, which stands at 66.8 points per contest.
Last time these two matched up, the Terriers exploited that porous defense for 73 points in a 73-65 victory in Stony Brook. That was the night of Tony Gaffney’s monster game. The sophomore forward torched the Seawolves for a career-high 20 points in what Wolff called the best game of Gaffney’s career.
Hassan also contributed that night, knocking down 16 points. Beauford and Popoko, of course, led the Seawolves with 18 and 16 points, respectfully.
TWO HEADS ARE
BETTER THAN ONE
Tuesday’s loss against Binghamton marked the 18th time this season that either Gardner or Hassan led the Terriers in points. In total, either Hassan or Gardner has been the top scorer in 18 out of 24 games this season, good for a staggering 75 percent.
Gardner has led BU in scoring 11 times and Hassan has been the leading scorer six times. The two shared the team-high in points on another occasion.
Also, Gardner has been the Terriers’ top scorer in four of the past five games.
CRYING WOLFF
A relatively unmentioned factor that’s possibly contributed to this season’s shooting woes in the absence of sophomore Matt Wolff.
Wolff came off the bench in every game but one (he started) as a true freshman last season and contributed with 4.3 points per game. The son of coach Dennis Wolff shot 47.3 percent from the field, including 51 percent in league play.
One wonders if BU would be struggling to score as much if Wolff hadn’t gone down in the fourth game of the season with a leg injury.
KIBBLES ‘ BITS
BU has performed well defensively all season, but they have been particularly stingy at Case Gymnasium. The Terriers are surrendering just 49.5 ppg and allowing opponents to hit only 35.9 percent of their shots from the field … Speaking of The Roof, junior big man Omari Peterkin has averaged 11.2 ppg in BU’s six games at Case. His scoring average in games played away or at Agganis Arena: 5.0 ppg … Unless they run the table the rest of the regular season and in the conference tournament, the Terriers are destined to finish below .500 for the first time since the 1999-00 campaign. That year’s squad went a dismal 7-22 (5-13 in conference play) and at one point lost nine in a row. Interestingly, three of the Terriers nine wins that year came against Northeastern University, including an 83-57 win in the opening round of the America East Tournament.