ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Matt Mobley was in class when he found out he’d won a national Player of the Week award.
He arrived to practice the way he normally does – a little later than most of his teammates and with a to-go container in hand.
Both the senior guard and the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team reentered the national conscience last week with their instant classic triumph over then-No. 16 Rhode Island. Mobley had 26 points and nine rebounds, earning the U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Oscar Robertson National POW award. Bona picked up a win that vaulted it back onto the ride side of the NCAA Tournament bubble.
Neither Mobley nor Bona feel as though they’ve arrived, however. Neither feels their work is done.
Much like in 2015-16, when it won at No. 15 Dayton, Bona still has four games it likely needs to win to keep its at-large chances in tact. The first comes tonight (7 o’clock, Stadium-Facebook Live-stream, WPIG-FM) against Duquesne inside the building that bursted on Friday, the Reilly Center.
“I think our guys aren’t satisfied. They know,” Schmidt said. “You can’t worry about what people are saying out in the street, in the newspapers, in social media. (The URI win) wasn’t the pinnacle. That was just a game we needed to win to make the next four that much more important.”
Two years ago, the Bonnies won each of those final four games to give themselves a chance. Their first game in the aftermath of that monumental victory over the Flyers? At home against Duquesne.
And so it will be tonight.
In their first meeting, Jaylen Adams scored a then-career-high 40 points, including the game-winning 3-pointer with five seconds remaining, to lift Bona to an 84-81 triumph in Pittsburgh. Since then, the teams have trended in opposite directions, with the Bonnies (20-6, 10-4) pushing their winning streak to eight games and Duquesne (15-12, 6-8) losing four-straight, including an embarrassing 80-57 home loss to last-place Fordham.
Bona, a 12-point favorite, is expected to beat the Dukes with relative ease. But after beating Rhode Island, this game becomes as big as any it’s played all season.
“We can’t allow Rhode Island to beat us against Duquesne,” Schmidt said. “We can’t have that mentality, and I know our guys don’t have that. We’re still climbing the mountain. We have four more games; we have to win all four games.
“When we started the season, we wanted to win all of them – whatever it was, 31 games – so the mentality hasn’t changed, and that’s what we’re going to try to do.”
The Bonnies have been virtually unbeatable at home, winning 11-straight, including all eight with Adams. They’re an injured Adams and one bucket against Niagara from being unbeaten in the RC this season.
Tonight is Bona’s penultimate home game, and the last with the students, who will be watching seniors Adams, Mobley and Idris Taqqee likely for the final time. The students will be treated to a video tribute of the trio while traditional Senior Night festivities will take place on Tuesday against Davidson.
After that win over the Rams, Bona expects another sizable and boisterous crowd for the Dukes. No matter home or away, however, with a world of momentum and four games against sub-100 RPI opponents remaining, the Bonnies’ season-long goal of being a Tournament team is within reach.
“Those guys have made February important,” Schmidt said. “There’s a lot of teams in the country that are just playing out the season right now. And the way they’ve played, they’ve put themselves in a position where the last four games are important, and that’s a credit to them.
“Our goal is to go out there and prepare as well as we can and try to give the best effort we can to give the people that come to our games their money’s worth. Hopefully that’s a victory on top of the effort that we give.”
Duquesne is led by the same quartet of guards that hurt the Bonnies in the first game – sophomore Mike Lewis II (15 points), senior Rene Castro-Caneddy (14 points), freshman Eric Williams (15 points, 9 rebounds) and junior Tarin Smith, who averages 13 points off the bench.
Smith had 24 points on 9-of-15 shooting while Castro-Caneddy had 21 and Lewis II 11 for the Dukes, who scored 81 points and shot 56 percent, the highest figure Bona has surrendered in an A-10 game this season.
In that one, Bona had a difficult time keeping the dribble-driving Dukes from getting to the rim. It made up for that by getting the first of Adams’ back-to-back 40-point games and another 19 points from Mobley. What adjustments need to be made in the rematch?
“They’re attackers. They want to live in the paint,” acknowledged Schmidt, whose team has won nine-straight home games over Duquesne, with its last loss coming in 2009, and is looking for its third sweep of the Dukes in the last four years.
“We’ve got to do a better job of taking care of the basketball, not giving them easy baskets. We gave them too many easy baskets in game one, too many layups.”
He added: “We can’t allow them to get to the rim and that’s what we did in game one. We’ve got to do a better job of squaring up the ball and trying to keep the ball above the foul line as best we can.”
