The Boston University men’s basketball team extended its winning streak to 10 games on Saturday, defeating Binghamton University, 63-59, before a crowd of 621 at Case Gymnasium.
The win capped a perfect 7-0 intersession break for the Terriers, a mark that includes a 61-60 upset at the University of Michigan on Dec. 30. Head coach Dennis Wolff called the victory the most significant win during his 10 years at BU.
On Saturday, sophomore guard Shawn Wynn scored 17 points and grabbed six rebounds and senior forward Ryan Butt tallied a game-high 18 points to pace BU (10-3, 4-0 America East) in the win. Senior forward Jason Grochowalski added 14 points in 21 minutes off the bench.
“I was able to get free early on and I knocked down my first couple of shots,” said Butt, who went 7-11 from the floor and 4-5 from three-point range. “That got me into the flow and it seemed to open up the whole game for us.”
But it was junior guard Chaz Carr whose hustle in the final minute gave BU the ultimate edge. With the score tied at 59, Carr missed a three-pointer from the right side only to follow his shot, come down with the rebound and toss an arching floater from the foul line with 26 seconds to play. The shot went in, and the Terriers sealed the game on a pair of Grochowalski free throws 15 seconds later.
“We continue to be fortunate because of our depth,” Wolff said. “We had four or five guys play very hard – Shaun Wynn, [senior guard] Kevin Fitzgerald and Jason Grochowalski. Defensively for the whole game we probably could have done a better job, but they have some talented inside players and those guys did a good job.”
Binghamton never led in the game, but hung around to make a run as time wound down, despite a second-half technical foul on the bench and the ejection of Alex Adediran (10 points, five rebounds) after a flagrant foul nine minutes later. The Bearcats used a 9-0 run late in the second frame to tie the game at 59-59, but the Terriers scored the final four points down the stretch.
“On a team like ours, anybody on any eiven day can put up numbers and I felt like today, the ball was just in my hands and I had to do what I had to do,” Wynn said.
The victory was big for a BU team that has been going all out since Dec. 26. Monday will be a day of rest before a road trip to face the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (5-8, 2-2 America East) on Wednesday.
The intersession proved to be anything but a break for the Terriers, as BU has played seven games since a 64-62 defeat of Cleveland State University on Dec. 22. A 60-52 win on the road at Fordham University was next on Dec. 28, and the Michigan upset followed two days later.
Before more than 10,000 fans at Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena, the Terriers stayed with the Wolverines (10-3, 1-1 Big Ten) in the first 20 minutes, trailing 38-34 at the break. BU stormed out to a 42-38 lead in the second frame, but Michigan came back to take a 53-50 lead with 6:36 to play. The game was tied again at 58-58 with 4:20 left, and the Terriers scored their final three points from the free throw line.
With the score 61-60, Fitzgerald missed the front end of a one-and-one with 2.9 seconds to go, but Michigan could not get a final shot off, giving BU one of its biggest wins in program history.
Conference wins over the University of New Hampshire, the University at Albany and the University of Hartford followed before Saturday’s nail-biter against Binghamton.
“We’ve won 10 in a row, but it has been a long stretch,” said Wynn, who leads the team in steals while averaging 7.9 points per game. “We have been traveling a lot over the break and basically we just need a day to get our legs back and recuperate.”
The Terriers are tied atop the America East Conference with the University of Vermont (7-5, 4-0), and a matchup between the teams is scheduled for Saturday. The Catamounts defeated the University of Maine on Sunday, 71-62, and have won seven of their last eight games, including four straight.
BU also owes Vermont a bit of revenge – the Catamounts stole an NCAA Tournament bid from the Terriers last year at Case Gym.
“We have run the table [over break], but in three of the last four games, we haven’t played at a high enough level to sustain this, so we have to get to that point,” Wolff said. “I would sound like somebody who has something wrong with them if I was sitting here telling you that I wasn’t happy with a team that has won 10 games in a row. So I am very happy with how they have worked, but I think we have to regroup and play a little bit better.”
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.
