You couldn’t help but think of the future. As much as you tried, the energized crowd of 4,778 and the quartet of freshman starters were just too conducive to letting your mind wander two or three years down the road.
George Washington University coach Karl Hobbs admitted to doing so himself.
“You’ve got to give them credit, their young guys played well. BU isn’t a team I want to play two years from now,” he said.
For the second straight season, the Boston University men’s basketball team began its season with a loss to a nationally recognized powerhouse. Last year, it was to Duke University. Friday, it was a 70-57 loss at Agganis Arena to a GW team that went 27-3 overall last season and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
The only difference was that this time the Terriers started four players who had never set foot on the college hardwood: Sherrod Smith (7 points), Tyler Morris (9), Corey Lowe (7) and Scott Brittain (3). Freshman Carlos Strong came off the bench to lead the team in points with 19, shooting 5-of-8 from beyond the arc.
“I was very proud of them in that you’ve got your first college game in Agganis and you fall behind 16-3, you could fold and they didn’t,” said BU coach Dennis Wolff.
The Colonials actually jumped out to a 17-point lead with 8:27 remaining in the first half, but the Terriers put together an impressive run that spanned the halves, cutting GW’s lead to four – the closest the Terriers would ever get.
That stretch, propelled by some key 3-pointers and a buzzer-beating lay-up from Strong, provided a brief glimpse at exactly how much potential the young Terriers have.
“At the beginning of the game, everyone was a bit anxious and I felt like we were rushing stuff,” Lowe said. “Once we all realized that we could stay with them and play with them, everything felt good.”
If anything, Lowe should have been worried about the evident thorn in the side of the Terriers – senior guard Carl Elliott, who entered the NBA draft last season before thinking better of it.
The 6-foot-4-inch Brooklyn, N.Y. native led all scorers with 25 points – he was 7-for-11 from the field, 11-for-11 on free throws and was the first player Lowe had to guard at the collegiate level. Quite a daunting welcome to the NCAA.
“You’ve just got to try to out-hustle him,” Lowe said. “The ball is gonna come through him at some point so I just had to be ready for it, stay in my stance and be ready the best I could. He outweighed me by probably 30 pounds, so it was hard to stay in front of him.”
“I felt bad for them, because of the lack of experience when it was a six- or seven-point game,” Wolff said. “That’s where fatigue sets in and that just kind of hurt us a little bit.”
One of the other headaches for BU was the inability to establish any presence inside the paint. The Colonials forced the Terriers to attempt 27 3-pointers.
Despite the fact that Wolff said the Terriers will be more of a perimeter-oriented team than they were last year and could possibly run three- or four-guard sets at times, the big men still need to get some love.
“I’d definitely love to see the ball more, and I know I will as these guys get more experience,” said senior co-captain Omari Peterkin. “As we play more games and practice more, we’ll be able to create more shots for everyone.”
Getting experience was certainly the theme of the night, and the reason Hobbs expressed his feelings on the grand scheme of the Terriers.
For now, however, it’s all about the present for a BU squad with tremendous upside.
“You’re always disappointed when you lose,” Wolff said. “But these kids are not gonna disappoint us very much at all the whole year in regard to how hard they try and what the potential is for them.”