ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — A mere five minutes earlier, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team had made history.
But you wouldn’t have known it at this moment.
Shortly after securing the program’s first outright Atlantic 10 regular season championship, the Bonnies stood silently in a circle around coach Mark Schmidt, whose tone was far from indicative of what had just transpired.
He commended his team of course. But standing at halfcourt of the Reilly Center, he reminded it before this Saturday practice: There’s still work to be done.
And the next metaphorical hurdle comes today when Bona meets dangerous, but enigmatic Dayton (5 o’clock, WPIG-FM, WHDL-AM) in its regular season finale on Bob Lanier Court.
Bona (13-3, 11-3) can both win out the regular year (from the point where its final eight days were rescheduled) and give itself plenty of momentum heading into its Friday morning Atlantic 10 Tournament quarterfinal. For many, this is also the last win needed to secure an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament.
So, yes, the hope is that its regular season crown is only the beginning.
“We have more to do, we have to keep on rolling,” Schmidt said. “We accomplished one goal, but we want to win the Atlantic 10 Tournament and the best way to do that is to go in there with momentum. We want to be 4-0 going in.
“We know it’s going to be a tough game (today), but our whole mindset is, we won something, but we want to continue to win. I guess it’s, ‘one, not done.’”
HISTORICALLY, beating Dayton, one of the conference’s banner programs, is a feat of its own. Schmidt’s team’s have only done it twice — in campaigns that ended with a postseason appearance (2012 and ‘16).
This time, however, it’s a rare expectation.
Dayton, a year after producing one of the best seasons in A-10 history, has had a mystifying 2020-21, having swept Saint Louis, including a recent 76-53 beatdown of the Billikens, and won at Davidson while also suffering utterly head-scratching losses to La Salle and cellar-dwellers Fordham and (most recently) Saint Joseph’s, allowing 97 points to the latter in a 13-point setback.
The Flyers still have a couple of key figures from that all-time 29-2 team, including senior guard Jalen Crutcher (18 points, 5 assists and 4 rebounds), a First Team All-Conference selection and one of the preseason favorites for Player of the Year, and fellow guards Ibi Watson (16 points) and Rodney Chatmon (9 points). Despite its inconsistency, it still ranks in the Top 100 of the NET projection, at No. 89.
To Schmidt, this is still the same standard-bearing Dayton.
“They’ve had some ups and downs and a lot of that probably has to do with the pandemic,” he said. “But they’ve got one of the best players in the league in Crutcher. He’s the quarterback; as he goes, they go. The kid Watson feeds off Crutcher, he shoots the ball extremely well.
“They’re just a really good team. You don’t beat Saint Louis by 23 by not having a good team. When Crutcher plays well, they’re nearly unbeatable. When they’re on top of it, they’re one of the best, if not the best team in our league. We’ve got a lot of work to do at 5 o’clock (today).”
