BROOKLYN, NY — Mika Adams-Woods and Daryl Banks III were all smiles after the latter sank yet another trio of free throws late in the second half to give the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team yet another lift in this Atlantic 10 Tournament.
At that point, this game was much like the Bonnies’ other two in Brooklyn:
Bona hadn’t played particularly well. It found itself trailing in the final 10 minutes. But it had begun to stage the comeback necessary for another stirring victory, Banks’ free throws part of a 9-0 run that brought Bona to within four with 6:26 remaining.
By the final buzzer, however, the two Bona guards’ delight had been replaced by despair. Adams-Woods pulled his No. 3 jersey over his face; Banks had tears falling from his own. It was a juxtaposition, from smiles to sorrow — and a game — that served as a microcosm for Bona’s season.
IN ONE moment, it had all the momentum, rallying from 14 down to make it a two-possession game. In the next, it had none, committing a crucial turnover on an errant Chad Venning pass with an opportunity to make it a one-point game and watching helplessly as Duquesne’s Dae Dae Grant somehow hit the most circus-like of circus 3-pointers.
At one point, it made big shots, rattling off nine of 11 points, highlighted by a Moses Flowers three-point play, to bring Bona to within 23-22 with 4:11 left in the first half. In another, it made none at all, going the final 4:11 of that half and the first 5:31 of the second half — a costly stretch of 9:42 — with zero points.
And in one instant, Bona seemed destined to reach its fourth A-10 championship game under Mark Schmidt, and in another, that would-be enormous win instead became an agonizing loss. And so it was in the Bonnies’ season-ending 70-60 loss to Duquesne in the A-10 semifinals on Saturday night inside Barclays Center. Up and down; good and bad; a season that began with, and was dotted throughout, by progress, ending with a pang of unfulfillment.
“We got some open looks that we missed, and that’s just how it is,” Bona coach Mark Schmidt said of that near 10-minute scoring drought. “We’re not gonna make every shot; It’s just … we had some breakdowns on defense and (Duquesne) hit some shots.
“Give them credit, they prepare just like we do. It’s two teams trying to win and there’s only one team that can win. Our effort was good. We had shots, we missed them; they went down the other end and made them. That’s basketball.”
BONA, AFTER those two inexplicable losses to close the regular season, was left for dead by any number of its fans for about the fifth time this year.
Some were ready to end the season then and there.
Others wondered where Bona goes from here in this age of the transfer portal and NIL.
The Bonnies? They, again, in a year that might not have been definitively great, still made a little something out of nothing.
In 2013-14, Bona followed a 6-10 conference campaign by knocking off the No. 1 seed en route to the tournament semifinals. In 2018-19, it responded to a 4-10 start by going on a tear, advancing all the way to the championship and coming within a missed buzzer-beating 3-pointer of an NCAA Tournament appearance.
And this year, on the heels of a solid, but perhaps unsatisfying regular season, it regrouped to pull out two gutsy last-second victories, the second over a good Loyola-Chicago team in double overtime, to galvanize its fanbase for a couple of days, inspire hope and draw a caravan of followers to Barclays for the semifinals.
On this day, though, Bona’s guards were simply not as good as Duquesne’s.
GRANT AND Jimmy Clark made several impressive plays, combining for 45 of the Dukes’ 70 points on 18-of-30 shooting, while Adams-Woods, Flowers and Charles Pride were held to single digits.
Bona, again, had a tough go against Duquesne’s league-leading 3-point defense, following up efforts of 2-for-13 and 5-for-15 in a pair of regular-season losses with a 6-of-24 outing Saturday, one that included a 2-for-17 start.
Bona was not as good as Duquesne, which was far from the Duquesne that Bona had won 13 of 14 against prior to last season; this was a Dukes group that played, competed and created for the duration. And in the end, the Bonnies’ inconsistency, not its team, was the last thing standing.
“Every time we made a run, it just seemed like they made a shot; one was a circus shot,” Schmidt noted. “(Grant and Clark) were a load, we shot 6-of-24 from 3s. We weren’t good enough and a lot of that had to do with Duquesne. They outplayed us.”
For the fans, despite their team winning 20-plus games for the sixth time in 17 years under Schmidt, the bad from this winter will likely outweigh the good. Bona lost to Duquesne three times in a season for the first time since 1986-87. For the team, as much as it hurt, as red-eyed as they might have been, there was still something to take from being within two wins of dancing.
“I didn’t go home after the first game like last year, so … we got two good wins,” Banks III said. “It is what it is. We came up short, but I wouldn’t change (our experience). I’m happy with our group of guys. I feel like we showed a lot of mental and physical toughness, especially coming off those two bad losses.
“I’m just proud of the group of guys I played with this year.”
Said Schmidt: “We came in and it was a whole new season. We played well for two games, we played well at times today. But the effort just wasn’t good enough.”
