KINGSTON, R.I. – Wednesday night’s matchup between two old conference foes, Boston University and the University of Rhode Island, may have brought some people back to the days when both competed in the ECAC in 1980. But Wednesday night’s game would’ve played out far differently back then, when the three-point shot had yet to be introduced.
BU coach Dennis Wolff looked like he wished the long-ranger was never invented as he buried his head in his hands for most of Wednesday’s 80-52 rout at the hands of Rhode Island at the Ryan Center. The Rams shot 7-11 (63.6 percent) from downtown in the first half to jump out to a 43-22 lead at halftime.
While there were a multitude of reasons why one of the Terriers’ most successful seasons will not continue, one of the major ones was the unexpected discrepancy between the two teams from 19 feet 9 inches and beyond.
It wasn’t just Rhode Island’s hot shooting (11-21 from three-point range for the night) that did BU in – it was also the Terriers’ inability to get anything going from the perimeter. The Terriers went 0-13 in the first half from three-point range and finished the game with a 17.9 percent (5-26) success rate.
“I think they hit some tough three-pointers in that stretch when they got ahead of us in the first half in transition,” Wolff said. “We had some good looks and not one guy for us – and some guys who are normally good shooters – looked like they had any legs in any of their shots right from the beginning of the game.”
Rhode Island’s Dawan Robinson (4-6 from three-point range) set the tone early when he hit the first three of the night from the right wing to send Rhode Island to a 9-0 start. Any time BU threatened to get within striking distance, a Ram player would fire away with success. After the Terriers closed a 30-10 deficit to 30-16, Robinson answered, hitting again from the right wing with senior guard Kevin Fitzgerald’s hand in his face.
BU closed a 19-point deficit to 37-22 with just over a minute to play in the first half, but Robinson responded again with a trey from the top of the key to keep Rhode Island ahead by a comfortable margin.
On the flip side, BU couldn’t connect from outside at all until junior guard Chaz Carr hit a three-pointer from the right corner with 18:56 to play in the game. Carr ended up heating up in the second half, accounting for four of the team’s five threes. He finished tied for a game-high 14 points for BU (4-10 from three).
Carr was unable to help the Terriers out of the first-half funk because he was benched for the first 10 minutes of the game due to a violation of team rules. That came as a sweet surprise for Rhode Island coach Jim Baron.
“Going into the game, I was real concerned about Carr,” Baron said. “We told our guys we were going to need two guys to guard him and switch off.”
Senior Jason Grochowalski, who has been the most successful player on BU from three-point range this season (26-56 for 46 percent) was 0-3 in the first half, front-rimming a pair of attempts. Classmate Matt Turner, who can heat up at any point from long range and may be the best pure shooter on the team, was 0-4.
The lopsided outside shooting was anything but expected, as the teams came in with equal résumés from beyond the arc.
If there was any edge, it would have gone to BU, which shot 33 percent from three-point range this season, compared to Rhode Island’s 32 percent. The Rams average less than five three-pointers a game compared to BU’s more than six. This Rhode Island team has the same players that combined to shoot 1-22 from outside in a game at Syracuse University in November, although it resembled more of the team that shot 72.2 percent (13-18) in a 38-point win over the University of Vermont in December.
The Terriers, on the other hand, looked nothing like the team that had shot more than 35 percent from beyond the arc in eight of its last 10 games.
“That wasn’t the same team that I looked at for most of the year,” Wolff said. “We looked like a team that had run out of gas.”
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