Men’s Basketball: Terriers advance to quarterfinals with strong defense against Lehigh

By: Ethan Fuller

BOSTON, MA — Boston University men’s basketball slammed the door on Lehigh early and often en route to a 69-58 victory in the first round of the Patriot League playoffs. With perhaps their best defensive effort of the season, the Terriers swarmed the Mountain Hawks right from tip-off, and never looked back in the Wednesday night win.

“We knew coming in, we would have to do a good job with our post defense,” coach Joe Jones said. “We just tried to take away their post options and force [Lehigh] to do some different things.”

The Terriers held Lehigh (4-11) to a 37 percent clip from the field on Wednesday. The Mountain Hawks sc0red just 23 first half points and never got anything going until the closing minutes, when scoring guard Marques Wilson nailed a few three-pointers to apply some pressure. He finished with a team-high 19 points.

BU (7-10) frequently “blitzed” the Mountain Hawk bigs, and Nic Lynch in particular struggled against the mobbing Terriers. He didn’t score a single point on the evening while committing two turnovers and shooting 0-of-5 from the floor. Freshman backup Dominic Parolin also struggled to the tune of 2 points on 1-of-6 shooting.

“We thought [Lynch] would have a hard time of handling blitzes inside, so we just tried to blitz him,” Jones said. “Sometimes when you blitz kids early, it takes them out of rhythm; it takes the team away from their strength, so they don’t think they can just go inside whenever we want.”

Walter Whyte led the Terriers with 19 points while canning 7 of his 9 looks. Outside of a few unfortunate turnovers on the fast break, Whyte looked the most comfortable all season, powering through the Mountain Hawks to tough layups and finding his range from deep.

It’s been a challenging season for the redshirt junior forward — he dealt with some injuries and did not practice until two days before his first game action. With back-to-backs and the moving target of scheduling in 2021, Whyte feels he’s finally getting into a groove.

“I’m big on doing the same thing every day, just a schedule. That whole thing where we were just stopping and going — you’re not really knowing what’s going on,” he said.

Jones showcased his playoff rotations on Wednesday and went to his starting unit for key dagger-like minutes in the second half. The lineup was tremendous across the board. Sukhmail Mathon (16 points, 7 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 blocks) punished the opposition inside. Javante McCoy (13 points) and Jonas Harper (10 points) also reached double figures.

Sophomore point guard Ethan Brittain-Watts logged a career-high 31 minutes in the win, and looks to be taking the next step as a lead facilitator. Jones noted that it’s been difficult to establish rotations during the back-to-back weekends. But Brittain-Watts has certainly earned his role.

“He does a lot for us. He creates pace for us. He gets the ball moving; he makes open shots,” Jones said. “When we were struggling, he was one of the guys who I thought was playing his role really well.”

Next up for BU is an opponent the Terriers know all too well. Colgate finished the season at 11-1 and is looking to avenge last year’s championship result with a postseason win of their own. The Raiders have already mopped up BU on four separate occasions this season. But after Wednesday’s win, the Terriers feel like they’ve found some key ingredients to success.

“It starts on the defensive end getting stops,” Whyte said. “You can control how hard you play on the defensive end; you can’t always control how many shots are going in… getting stops are gonna keep us in the game the whole 40 minutes.”

Saturday’s quarterfinal matchup is scheduled for a 1:00 p.m. tip-off. It will mark one week shy of a calendar year between BU and Colgate’s fateful matchup that became one of the last college basketball games played before the United States entered the cultural “beginning” of its quarantine period.

The realization has barely even hit Whyte yet. But through a tumultuous year, he finds solace in the two squads being back in a similar position.

“It is pretty wild that a whole year’s gone by and we’re right back to square one,” Whyte said. “It’s basically just a restart — we’re going back at it.”