The Boston University women’s basketball team traveled to St. John’s University on Saturday expecting to knock off a Big East Conference foe.
Understandably, BU coach Kelly Greenberg and her Terriers were quite disappointed when they left Queens, N.Y. with a 76-69 loss.
“We definitely went into this game thinking we were going to win it,” said Greenberg, whose team fell to 5-3.
“It really came down to two things,” she continued. “We gave them way too many open looks – especially in the first half – and then we played pretty good defense, but gave up a lot of offensive boards.”
The Terriers’ expectations might have been somewhat inflated by the belief that Red Storm senior Kia Wright would be on the bench due to injury, but the St. John’s star was on the court giving the Terriers fits all night.
“Sure enough,” Greenberg said, “[Wright] played her most minutes of the year against us. That really freed up [Monique] McLean and [freshman Sky Lindsay] to kind of just do their thing. The three of them really hurt us.”
McLean led the Red Storm (5-1) with 21 points on 46.6 percent shooting, including two big 3-pointers in the winding minutes of the first half to help St. John’s build a 10-point halftime lead. When all was said and done, the trio of Lindsay, McLean and Wright combined for 47 of the team’s 76 points.
Junior Jesyka Burks-Wiley led the Terriers with a career-high 21 points and also pulled down a game-best 12 rebounds despite missing a quarter of the game due to early foul trouble.
“Early in the game some of our forwards were just settling on outside shots,” Greenberg said. “We kept saying we have to go inside on this team. I thought in the second half Jes really took over inside. She made some good post moves and really took it to them.”
Over a four-minute span in the middle of the second half, Burks-Wiley scored 10 points and hauled in four rebounds, helping to trim the Red Storm lead from 12 to five.
St. John’s bounced back to extend its lead to 13 with 4:49 left, only to have BU make another late charge. Burks-Wiley made two free throws with 33 seconds left in regulation to cut the lead to five. Unfortunately for the Terriers, two Red Storm free throws in the last 30 seconds finished the scoring, and St. John’s walked away with the seven-point victory.
Foul trouble plagued the Terriers throughout the contest. Senior Kasey Devine, who ranks second on the team in scoring (12.4), fouled out with just more than six minutes to play, while four other Terriers picked up four fouls. Among the culprits was senior Cheri Raffo, who was called for two fouls in a 12-second span early in the first half.
St. John’s went to the line almost twice as often as the Terriers, and despite the fact the Red Storm shot just 63.3 percent from the charity stripe, it’s undeniable that BU’s foul trouble played a key part in the loss.
“At one point in the first half I think the fouls were like 9-2 [in the Red Storm’s favor],” Greenberg said. “They were frustrating fouls for our girls. They were just unlucky. All of a sudden, a person would fall or something. It happened to Jes several times, and she got in foul trouble early. Just because she was in the area they’d call fouls.”