ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Save for the howling winds outside, the Reilly Center was silent.
Aside from the three stray basketballs that rested randomly on the floor, the home of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team was unoccupied.
The Bonnies, of course, weren’t supposed to be here anyway. If all had gone well on Thursday, they’d have been taking on Saint Louis in the Atlantic 10 Tournament quarterfinals at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center at this very moment.
The scene, however, seemed a perfect representation of what Bona — and every other Division I basketball player with something to play for — must still have been feeling on Friday, 24 hours after its season came to an abrupt end with the cancellation of the league’s championship due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Empty.
The debate over just how good a season the Bonnies had is a worthwhile one.
And from here, until this week, it was as successful as could be expected.
Bona, with a team comprised almost exclusively of sophomores and freshmen, would have secured a fourth 20-win campaign in five years with a victory over George Mason on Thursday. If Osun Osunniyi and Jaren English hadn’t each missed seven full games due to injury, it might actually have been aiming for a 21- or 22-win season.
The Bonnies also came within a win over the Billikens in their regular season finale of finishing fourth or better in the league standings for a third-straight winter. Not bad for a group that lost two key contributors from the previous campaign, including First Team All-Conference selection Courtney Stockard, and was playing in an exponentially better A-10 this year.
And even then, who wouldn’t have taken fifth with this young a roster at the beginning of the season?
In Year 2 of the Osunniyi-Kyle Lofton-Dominick Welch era, it wasn’t all good for these Bonnies, though.
Coach Mark Schmidt’s team went just 5-10 against opponents ranked in the Top 160 of the NCAA’s NET rankings and 13-2 versus foes 161 and lower. Its 11-7 league record might have been different had it not benefited from an “easy” A-10 schedule that included nine games against the bottom five teams in the conference (though it certainly doesn’t have to apologize for playing a slate the league comprises).
Additionally, it was surprisingly uncompetitive at times, losing four A-10 games by at least 23 points.
Still, this was yet another solid season under Schmidt, whose group once again shook off a slow, injury-riddled start to give itself something meaningful to play for in the final, fateful days of the year.
The Bonnies’ “Big 3” took a step forward as sophomores, with Lofton and Osunniyi vaulting from all-conference-caliber to all-conference selections. Their two most promising freshmen, Justin Winston and Alejandro Vasquez, established themselves as quality A-10 players by year’s end, putting together a handful of standout individual performances along the way.
And, more than anything, this year reaffirmed what we already knew: That this group has a profoundly bright future and, if it remains together, should absolutely compete for a league title next winter … and a league title and much more in 2022.
But, boy, does all of it — the good, the bad; the highs, the lows — seem so secondary after having the end of the season pulled out from under it, while on its way to the Barclays Center, on Thursday.
It’s funny, this had generally been a memorable week under Schmidt for all the right reasons.
On March 11, the Bonnies both won their only A-10 Tournament championship (in 2012) and secured their second at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament of this millenium (2018). On March 13 two year ago, they beat UCLA for their first victory in the Big Dance in 48 years.
But on the day in between, March 12, they were dealt a devastating blow, one topped only in the Schmidt era by their NCAA Tournament snub in 2016.
In one of the most stunning ends to a season in program history, the team’s lone senior, Amadi Ikpeze, was denied a final chance to play on the A-10 Tournament stage and compete for a conference title. Its super sophomores, after their coming out party on this weekend last year, were prevented a chance at an encore.
And the very games for which Bona had been putting its literal blood, sweat and tears into since the summer never materialized.
A day after the Bonnies returned from the league championship that never was, the university issued a statement saying the school was going to transition to online classes-only for the next two weeks and that students were free to leave campus in that timeframe if they so chose.
It all made for a stillness on campus Friday that was almost eerie.
None of the players were shuffling around the RC the way they usually might be at this time. No one was on Bob Lanier Court shooting away the pain. There was already no trace — no sights or sounds — of a 19-win campaign that produced its share of entertaining and dramatic moments.
And that silence said it all.
In the end, there’s no way of grading just how good this 2019-20 season truly was. It will, unfortunately, forever go down as an incomplete.
