The college basketball season is always an interesting one, with one season never matching another. Some teams go on unprecedented tears, where they are deemed unbeatable and effectively handed the crown. But after a few losses, that same team is left in the gutter by the very same people (namely us writers) who were singing its praises only a couple of weeks ago.
Nothing about the team itself necessarily changes, but the body of work that it has compiled does. And let’s face it ‘-‘- wins and losses are really all that matter in the end. These streaks and slumps are to be expected from almost any squad, and can work to define a given season.
Perhaps nobody knows this better right now than the BU men’s basketball team. The very same team that was lighting up its conference and being penciled into brackets for the NCAA Tournament is now in a bit of a rut. Any good will generated from their eight-game win streak has effectively vanished for the Terrier hoopsters in the matter of a few days.’
They have lost back-to-back conference games and now find themselves in the same place they were about a month ago: buried behind several teams in the America East standings, and knocking on mediocrity’s door.
If the losses to Vermont and Binghamton mean anything, they should at least signal that the proverbial honeymoon is over for BU, and for now, it’s back to reality.
Outside of John Holland’s monster slam in the first half (the top play on SportsCenter’s Top 10), really nothing emerged from the Vermont game that any of the Terrier players should keep in the back of their minds for a while. It was really only competitive for about a half, until what was only a four-point deficit turned into an utter beatdown ‘-‘- a 75-47 final in a game that was supposed to pit the two best teams in the conference against each other.
After watching that game, I could think of nothing else except that I believe that BU was overmatched, simply put.
Vermont has now swept that season series, and I sure hope that someone upsets them early in the America East Tournament because I think that at this juncture in the season, BU will be hard pressed to beat the Catamounts, regardless of where they play.
It’s not that this Terrier team is fundamentally flawed ‘-‘- they certainly have the capability to beat any team in their conference. But so many things went wrong in that loss that they are hard to ignore, and it gets you to wondering whether one of those aspects of the game will emerge at the wrong time and, ultimately, be the death nail to a season that held so much promise.
Maybe it was getting outrebounded and not scooping up enough boards. Maybe more perimeter defense should have been implemented on UVM’s Mike Trimboli so he wouldn’t keep draining uncontested 3s. The zero bench points ring a bell?
Although those things may have played a part in the loss, nothing hurt the Terriers more than turnovers.
BU’s 21 giveaways, matched with a mere five assists (a 0.24 assist-to-turnover ratio that would make even Darko Milicic cringe), is a stat line that even the most talented of teams cannot overcome. And for BU, it resulted in an embarrassing 15-point second-half offensive output and its most crippling defeat of the season thus far.
A couple days later at Case Gymnasium, BU followed its Vermont loss with another one, this time at the hands of Binghamton. The team got off to a slow start and never seemed to recover from it. Corey Lowe’s 2-of-15 shooting didn’t help matters, but thankfully we can take solace in the fact that he will never have that bad of a performance for the rest of the year. The Terriers staged a furious and admirable comeback, but the deficit ultimately proved to be too much.
It’s not that Binghamton’s a bad team or anything, but this was a game that the Terriers needed. As much as I hate the term, it really seemed like a ‘must-win’ game. It was a home contest and a victory would have at least been something to ease the pain from last Thursday’s blowout.
The time has now come to move on. The BU men have dealt with adversity before this season, and there is no reason to believe that they can’t rebound from these losses and get their season back on track. The rest of their schedule is pretty favorable, and even though it’s painful to admit, the America East regular season really doesn’t mean all that much.
What does matter, though, is the conference tournament. For a low-major program like BU, NCAA Tournament berths are an ultimate barometer of success, and this Terrier team can achieve just that by walking away with the America East Tournament title.
To borrow a couple of sports clich’eacute;s (my column is titled after one, so I might as well), what’s done is done, and now it’s time to regroup, because if the team wants to keep playing into late March, the road does not get any easier.
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