By Pat Tintle
Sports Editor
With the national television spotlight upon it, the men’s basketball team came back from a first-half deficit to defeat Atlantic 10 rival St. Joseph’s 70-61 last Sunday.
The team started the game with four turnovers within the first ten minutes of play. Despite giving the Hawks an early lead, the Bonnies tightened their performance late in the first half to close the Hawks’ lead to 29-28.
The Bonnies’ late first-half surge carried over into the second half, and the team took its first lead of the game when senior center Youssou Ndoye broke away with a dunk to put his team up 37-35 with just over 15 minutes to play. St. Joseph’s would rally back, producing a 7-0 run to cut the Bonnies lead to 55-54. Back-to-back three pointers from sophomore guard Denzel Gregg and junior guard Marcus Posley padded the Bonnies’ lead. Holding the lead for the rest of the game, St. Bonaventure improved to 10-6 (3-2), as the Hawks fell to 7-9 (1-4).
“I thought we got off to a sluggish start,” Coach Mark Schmidt said. “I thought in the first five to six minutes it was similar to George Mason, but I thought we found ourselves and finished the half. We had six to seven stops at the end of the first half, and we cut the lead to one.”
Schmidt refused to panic, and he was confident that his team would come out stronger in the second half.
“In the Atlantic 10 – I tell the guys all the time – its going to come down to the last two or three minutes,” Schmidt said. “The team that can make the plays, both offensively and defensively, will win the game, and we found a way to make those plays.”
As has been the pattern this season, the Bonnies’ five starters carried the offense throughout the game. Posley finished with 23 points, and Ndoye, who was named A-10 co-Player of the Week, finished with 15 points to go with his six rebounds, five assists (a career high) and three blocks. St. Bonaventure shot for a stellar 59 percent (13-22) in the second half, their second-best scoring half of the season.
Posley has emerged as the Bonnies top scoring threat this season. The guard’s five triples led to his eighth 20-point game of the season – the most in the A-10. But Posley credited his teammates’ ability to play as a unit as the deciding factor against the Hawks.
“Everybody just rallied together,” Posley said about the Bonnies second-half performance. “We finally hit that point in the game when everybody was just clicking with each other.”
Having won two games in a row after dropping two straight, Ndoye sees a change of pace in the Bonnies’ A-10 hopes.
“Anytime you come off of two bad loses and then you (win) two in a row, we kind of have momentum,” Ndoye said. “We’re trying to gain momentum and seal another (win) in a row.”
After making his game-changing dunk, Ndoye stated that he wanted to give his team a much-needed spark in front of the home crowd, something that was lacking until that point.
“I was just trying to get our guys going,” Ndoye said. “I came out flat in the first minute. In the second half, I promised that I was going to play better and get some energy going.”
The team is in the middle of a two-game road trip as they faced Duquesne on Thursday and will play Rhode Island on Sunday, Jan. 25 at 2 p.m. The Bonnies will return to the Reilly Center on Jan. 31 when they go head-to-head against La Salle at 7 p.m.
