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Terriers Regress In New Hampshire Loss

Slowly, but surely, the Boston University women’s basketball team has taken steps in the right direction this year.

The Terriers (13-9, 6-5 America East) have won games without their best players, and they’ve won others where leading scorer Katie Terhune basically did it all. They’ve found a way to pull out ugly wins when their offensive skills deserted them, and they’ve outscored teams to win high-scoring thrillers.

But with a chance to close their longest homestand of the season with authority and position themselves for a stretch run, the Terriers took a big step backward Saturday with a 56-49 loss to the University of New Hampshire. Instead of heading across town to Northeastern University tomorrow night in sole possession of third place, the Terriers now find themselves in a four-way tie for fourth place with the Universities of Maine, New Hampshire and Hartford.

While the Terriers got soundly outplayed statistically, they lost Saturday’s game primarily because they couldn’t put together successful offensive and defensive possessions. If the Terriers got a defensive stop, they often went the other way and missed a layup, wasted the shot clock before jacking up an ill-advised three-pointer or tried to force a pass to a double-teamed teammate, resulting in a turnover. When the Terriers did get some points, they quickly gave them right back on defense, either through silly fouls or putbacks of offensive rebounds.

In short, the Terriers made the type of mistakes that they haven’t been making nearly as much this season. But with the program’s first winning season since 1994-95 and a possible high seed in the America East tournament hanging in the balance, these problems couldn’t have shown up at a worse time.

TERRIERS CAN RUN, BUT NOT WITH LEADS

One trend, however, that has been apparent for the Terriers this year is their inability to take early leads, run with them and put opponents away early. Of the Terriers’ 13 victories, only three of them have been by more than 15 points. In fact, since an 82-48 win at Division I bottom-feeder Central Connecticut State University on Dec. 29, BU’s largest margin of victory has been 13 points.

Part of the problem is due to the Terriers’ maddening inconsistency on offense. In addition to shooting only 37.5 percent from the field as a team (almost a four percent drop-off from last year), the Terriers will often have stretches where they seem to hit every shot they take, followed by stretches where they can’t shoot a basketball into the ocean.

Case in point: In Saturday’s loss, the Terriers managed to grab a 49-48 lead on Larissa Parr’s layup with 5:27 left in regulation. They held the Wildcats to only three field goals in the final eight minutes of the contest. But the Terriers didn’t score again after Parr’s go-ahead basket, and New Hampshire was able to do just enough on offense to preserve the win.

While it’s unrealistic to expect the Terriers to win every game by 25 points, Saturday’s result showed what can happen when you let a team hang around for too long.

TERHUNE LOOKS TO GET BACK AT IT

While Terhune is still comfortably leading the America East scoring race at 18.8 points per game, she has averaged only 13 points per game in her last three contests and has struggled to get to the free throw line, where she usually scores a lot of her points. But the Terriers’ next two opponents should be a good tonic for her slump.

In BU’s last game against Northeastern (a 76-63 win on Jan. 20), Terhune scored a career-high 35 points. Huskies’ coach Willete White said then her team “had no answer for [Terhune],” and despite her team’s improved health situation since then, it still doesn’t appear they have found that answer.

CONFERENCE RACE HEATS UP

As if Hartford hadn’t shown enough inconsistency this year, the Hawks upset conference front runner SUNY-Binghamton on Saturday, 55-49. Last-place Albany nearly pulled off a shocker of its own, leading pre-season favorite University of Vermont by 10 points at halftime. But the Catamounts, behind Libby Smith’s 14 second-half points, rallied to pull out a 69-65 win.

The Catamounts, now a half-game ahead of the pack, play the Bearcats for the first time this year at 7 p.m. tonight in Binghamton, N.Y. They meet again next Tuesday (Feb. 19) in Burlington. These two meetings will almost certainly decide who receives the top seed in next month’s America East tournament.

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