BY: ANDREW HALE, MANAGING EDITOR
The No. 7 seeded St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team fell 70-60 to the No. 6 seeded Duquesne Dukes in the Atlantic 10 Semifinal game.
The semifinal matchup was the third time the two teams played each other in three months.
Bonnies sophomore forward Assa Essamvous drove to the lane, converting a layup and scoring the game’s first points.
While double-teamed in the paint, redshirt junior forward Chad Venning got the tightly contested layup to go giving the Bonnies an early 4-0 lead.
However, on the next Bonaventure offensive possession, Venning traveled for the second time and was subbed out for redshirt junior center Noel Brown with 16:45 left.
Two early threes from Dukes’ senior guard Dae Dae Grant tied the game at six.
The threes kept raining for Grant as he hit his third 3-pointer of the game a minute later. Duquesne shot 4-5 from the three through the first 14 minutes, taking a 14-9 lead.
Brown put the Bonnies within six after his pump fake in the paint fooled two Dukes defenders leading to an open layup.
Like in Bonaventure’s quarterfinal matchup against Loyola, Noel left the game with an apparent injury at the 6:47 mark. The Bonnies backup big man returned three minutes later.
An and-1 from redshirt senior guard Moses Flowers cut the Duquesne lead to 23-20 with 4:52 left in the half.
Down three, Venning used a spin move at the top of the key to drive past the Duquesne defenders and convert an open layup.
These would be the last Bonaventure points for nearly nine minutes.
“We got some open looks and we missed, and that’s just how it is,” said Bonaventure head coach Mark Schmidt. “We’re not going to make every shot. We had some breakdowns on defense, and they hit some shots.”
After an acrobatic spin move from Duquesne freshman guard Jake DiMichele, the Dukes took a 28-22 going into the half.
The Bonnies shot 1-8 from 3-point range in the first half, compared to Duquesne who went 6-13 from three.
“If you look at our statistics early in the year from the three-line, versus how we’ve done in the conference, we’ve done much better,” said Duquesne head coach Keith Dambrot. “We’re built outside-in, which is a little different than most people. We’re not a gap team. We’re a pretty hard-pressure team in the half-court, which means you give up a few more drives and a few less threes.”
Coming out of the tunnel, Duquesne did not slow down. The Dukes went on an 8-0 run to begin the half, taking a resounding 36-22 lead.
A 3-pointer from sophomore Barry Evans ended the Bonnies scoring drought with 15:30 to go in the second half.
Evans finished the game with seven points, seven rebounds and two assists.
An alley-oop thrown by graduate student guard Mika Adams-Woods and slammed down by Evans ignited the crowd and cut the lead to 10 with 13 minutes.
Six consecutive points from redshirt senior guard Daryl Banks III and a 3-pointer from graduate student guard Charles Pride put the Bonnies within four.
50-46 would be the closest the Bonnies would get as the Dukes answered with three 3-pointers of their own.
A turnover by Venning and a one-legged 3-point shot from Grant at the end of the shot clock gave the Dukes a 53-46.
“It was more of a park shot,” said Grant. “We try a lot of trick shots after practice and half-court shots, jelly layups and stuff like that. I wouldn’t say it was a comfort, but it was just a try and I called glass on it in the game. So, it went in and I appreciate the basketball gods for that.”
A layup from DiMichele with 56 seconds left put the Dukes up 64-53. This would wind up being the nail in the coffin for Bonaventure.
A pair of 3-pointers from Essamvous and Pride with less than 20 seconds left wouldn’t be enough as the Bonnies fell 70-60.
“Going into the tournament on a two-game losing streak or a two-game winning streak, it doesn’t matter,” said Schmidt. “We just came here, and it was a whole new season. We played well for two games, and we played well at times today, but the effort just wasn’t good enough.”
Bonaventure shot 40% from the field and 6-24 from three. Duquesne shot 50% from the field and 10-21 from three.
Grant finished with a game-high 27 points, shooting 10-15 from the field.
“I just give big shout-outs to my teammates and our coaching staff, I couldn’t have done this without them,” said Grant. “They were finding me, and I was finding open spots and hitting open shots. Great thanks to them and the guys who stepped up off the bench. Just all of us, we stuck together as a brotherhood.”
Banks III led the Bonnies with 14 points, shooting 4-12 from the field in potentially his final game as a Bonnie.
“I had an amazing experience my two years here,” said Banks III. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I made a lot of connections. These guys are my family. Of course, I wanted to go further, but going out with these groups of guys, I couldn’t ask for a better ending.”
Duquesne has a date with VCU in the A-10 Championship Sunday afternoon. The Dukes are playing in their first finals since 2009. They last won in 1997, the conference’s first title game.
The Bonnies end their season 20-13, the team’s sixth 20-win season under Schmidt.
“We had a good year,” said Schmidt. “It was up and down. The last game never defines you. Very few teams win that last game, but I thought we had a good team. We struggled at times, but we fought through adversity and came out and lost in the semifinals. Our goal was to win the thing; we came up short.”
halea22@bonaventure.edu
