Little truths are scattered throughout a season. They come to light during winning streaks, close games, five-minute runs and brief practices. Most are caught and addressed, but some linger because they can neither be fixed nor exploited.
The truth during the Boston University men’s basketball team’s 60-59 loss to Binghamton University on Saturday afternoon was that the Terriers can be beat if you play at a higher gear. And that’s just what the Bearcats did in gaining a 13-point halftime advantage.
The discretionary preface here is that any team can be beat if their two leading scorers ‘-‘- in this case junior Corey Lowe and sophomore John Holland ‘-‘- shoot a combined 6-of-24 and that the Terriers played what BU coach Dennis Wolff called as bad a first half as they’ve played all year. That said, the Bearcats’ aggressive offensive gameplan was so relentless that the Terriers appeared to have little chance should the game continue in the same fashion.
‘We went small, and we thought we would go fast,’ Binghamton coach Kevin Broadus said. ‘We got the long rebounds, and we were making a few shots. We got lucky early, and we were thinking we could parlay that.’
The Bearcats, starting four guards 6-foot-4 and under, didn’t just get the long rebounds, they got nearly every rebound. At the break, Binghamton had gobbled up 24 boards ‘- including eight offensive ‘-‘- to the Terriers’ nine. Going full speed after every defensive rebound, the Bearcats had six fast-break points at the half, but many more thanks to the secondary break, which accounts for their 20-10 halftime scoring advantage in the paint. The Terriers’ seven-man rotation just couldn’t keep up.
‘We were kind of stuck in the mud going after the ball and back on our heels the whole half,’ Wolff said.
So did the Binghamton blitzkrieg provide a blueprint for beating the shorthanded Terriers?
‘I’m not sure, because they’ve got good enough athletes,’ Broadus said. ‘The thing that makes them so good is that they can play at a slow pace, they can play at a high pace and they can play at any pace.’
The truth was that as effective as Binghamton’s pace was, it was unsustainable. In the second half, the Bearcats gradually shifted toward a half-court oriented offense, at times running the shot clock down to single digits before initiating a hurried play. Once they even got whistled for a 10-second half-court violation just for walking the ball up the court with the urgency of the hare, napping peacefully as the tortoise plodded along.
As the game slowed, size prevailed. The Terriers fed the ball to Scott Brittain (career-high-tying 20 points) and Jake O’Brien (15 points), and finished six rebounds behind Binghamton. The game was decided by a few plays ‘-‘- the Terriers losing after a last-second miss from Lowe ‘-‘- but it was hardly the blowout the first half seemed to preview.
And while that tired opening half may have been a reflection of BU’s short rotation and tired legs, Saturday offered a far more important reminder that the Terriers are not, and have never been this season, friendly with adversity.
‘What happens to everybody in this league is you get ahead, you relax, the other team comes back,’ Wolff said. ‘When you get behind, if you keep chipping away, you can get back in it.’
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.
