This is the Part 1 of a 2-part review of the BU men’s basketball team’s season.
Training, weight lifting and lots of summer pick-up games. That’s what will be in store for the Boston University men’s basketball team in the long offseason after its Dance card was pulled last week.
The Terriers, who by all accounts achieved all their goals this season, will likely remain together for much of the offseason, as they did one year ago. Most of the players, if not all, will remain in Boston to make the grueling workouts and practices less difficult.
BU won’t get to showcase it’s 2002-03 squad until November, which may seem like an eternity for the team in general and several players in particular who are ready for another successful season.
The Terriers finished out the season with a 22-10 overall record and a 13-3 clip in the America East. Just three losses in the conference was BU’s best performance in league play since 1996-97, when it went 17-1, also, coincidentally, the last time BU went to the NCAA Tournament.
BU set out a list of team goals at the start of the season, as many teams do, vowing to accomplish as many as possible. They were as follows: a regular season championship, home-court advantage, an America East title and a trip to the Big Dance. Rarely does a team get to check off each goal one by one; BU did that this year.
The Terriers late-season success could be attributed to the program’s strength of schedule, which has increased each of the past four years and is a testament to BU coach Dennis Wolff’s aspirations for his players.
BU overcame a tough University of New Orleans team in its first game Nov. 13, 69-63, and immediately followed with what turned out to be one of its toughest games of the year, a 90-61 loss to then-No. 8 University of Iowa. Though they were beaten handily, junior guard Matt Turner dropped 17 points on the Hawkeyes, and the Terriers would be a better team for it by season’s end.
BU returned from its trip to Iowa only to face another nationally ranked opponent, then-No. 17 Boston College. The Terriers put up a fight against the Eagles, but the B-line battle fizzled out early in the second half as BC pulled away en route to an 82-65 win. After a win at St. Peter’s, BU again fell to a perennially strong team, losing by just three points to George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
After facing top teams early in the season and having earned plenty of frequent flyer miles, BU was 2-3. The Terriers had started out with a better record a year ago, but they concluded the year 14-14 overall and 9-9 in the conference, walking off empty-handed. Wolff reiterated that this year’s team was one that wanted to win, and his players backed him up later on.
Important wins against the College of the Holy Cross, Dartmouth College and Harvard University, and an overtime win on the road against the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, jumpstarted the Terriers.
BU looked as if it might be doomed by injuries once again when Turner went down with a season-ending injury after separating his shoulder diving for a loose ball on Dec. 1 against Holy Cross. Turner, arguably the team’s best player and certainly its most athletic, would be forced to red-shirt. That news was made even worse when BU found it would lose the services of 6’8″ forward Jerome Graham, who seemed poised have a spectacular year.
A year ago, the Terriers could not escape injury. Wolff refused to dwell on the unexplainable rash of injuries circling his team; it seemed once again that BU would need to bite the bullet and endure yet another season with an incomplete team.
However, freshman guard Chaz Carr, an explosive, high-scoring player eerily reminiscent of Turner, joined the fray, and things were looking up. Carr, junior forward Billy Collins and sophomore guard Kevin Fitzgerald combined to form the base of a team that wouldn’t quit.
BU would win seven of its first eight games in 2002, with its only loss the first of two to the University of Vermont. After six-straight wins in that stretch, the Terriers lost back-to-back games for only the second time of the season on Jan. 29 and Feb. 2, to the University of Hartford and again to Vermont. Questions swirled. Was the run a fluke? Would the Terriers be able to knock off Vermont when it counted? Was there any way to get Turner back?
With a proverbial “shush,” the Terriers silenced all critics who saw the ghosts of last season’s patches of losses returning. BU rattled off six-straight wins to finish the regular season as co-champions with Vermont. Talk of a BU-Vermont championship game was already in the open.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
