Men’s Basketball: BU falls to 0-2 in the Patriot League as shooting woes continue against Lafayette

Featured image by Jacob Ireland

By Sam Robb O’Hagan

BOSTON — It was the same story, it was the same result. A few games early in the season could have been fairly chalked up to an anomaly, at worst a slight cause for concern. But BU has now played 15 games, and they’re shooting just 40.8 percent from the field. That’s fourth-worst in the Patriot League.

And in their 10 losses, the number is all the way down at 36.2.

Boston University men’s basketball (5-10, 0-2 PL) fell to Lafayette College (3-13, 2-0 PL) at Case Gym on Saturday in their second game of conference play. It was the same story. And it felt like a tipping point.

In the conference opener at Navy on Wednesday, BU shot just 33.9 percent. Against Lafayette, after a quick 7-0 run early in the first half to race out to a 17-6 lead, BU didn’t make a shot for the next 10 minutes. 

When the Leopards took their first lead with 14 minutes left in the second half, the Terriers had four buckets in the previous 16 minutes of game time. They made just seven more field goals the rest of the way.

BU made 16 shots, just 30.2 percent of its attempts. Both were its lowest output since the second game of the season, almost two months ago. 

“It’s hard to win any game shooting, you know, 30 percent,” BU head coach Joe Jones said. The Terriers have been saying that all season.

A reckoning is needed. BU can’t keep shooting poorly and throwing its hands up.

“We have to examine what we’re doing,” Jones said. “We think we have a lot of guys that can make shots, but we’re not shooting the ball well from 3 at all.”

BU shot 26 3-pointers on Saturday. It made eight.

When the Terriers gave up on perimeter looks and threw the ball inside to its posts, it got similar results. Sophomore forwards Nico Nobili and Otto Landrum are the only true post-players left on the active roster — junior Malcolm Chimezie will miss the rest of the season with a knee injury — and they weren’t effective in their isolated looks down low. Landrum shot 5-for-16. Nobili barely shot the ball at all.

But it’s been the same story there, too. The two haven’t been efficient on shots inside the arc, a vast majority of them around the rim, all season.

“It’s hard for us, we don’t score the ball at the rim great, and so now we’re saying we got to make 3s to win,” Jones said. 

“If you don’t score the ball well at the rim, and you’re not shooting the ball well from three, it’s hard to win.”

It sure is.

Coincidentally, BU’s guards have been hesitant to attack the rim off the dribble all season. Senior Miles Brewster, junior Ethan Okwuosa, and freshman Kyrone Alexander have been the Terriers’ mainstays in the backcourt, starting the last 14 games. Their roles have been reduced to running a set-heavy offense — which, at times, has led to turnovers (BU committed 14 on Saturday, and Jones cited them multiple times after the game) — or simply passing it into the post for Landrum and Nobili.

It hasn’t worked. Not consistently enough, at least. In BU’s losses — and there are now 10 of them — the Terriers are averaging just 56.4 points per game.

“We have to examine how we’re attacking people,” Jones said.

As he had in BU’s previous three games, Brewster showed promise attacking the rim against the Leopards. To cap the early 7-0 spurt in the first half — easily the Terriers’ best stretch of the game — Brewster aggressively drove to the cup and finished with an impressive move that forced Lafayette into an immediate timeout.

But Brewster (six points, seven assists) took just three shots inside the arc over the entire 40 minutes.

“I think we got to talk about trying to open up some spaces to attack on the dribble more,” Jones said.

Junior guard Ethan Okwuosa (nine points, seven rebounds) has shown a willingness to attack the basket and shoot mid-range jumpers all season, and when he has, the results have been there — almost 50 percent on shots inside the arc. But Okwuosa simply hasn’t had many of those looks.

Five of the 11 shots Okwuosa took on Saturday were 3s. He made one.

Said Jones, when asked if he wants Brewster and Okwuosa to look to create their own shots with dribble penetration more often: “Definitely, I think that’s something we’ve got to look at.”

The Terriers growing trend of poor shooting has come with another equally frustrating story. BU has yet to finish a close game. In the Patriot League opener in Annapolis on Wednesday, the Terriers surrendered the game-winning basket in the final minute and lost by two. In losses at Dartmouth and against Maine in non-conference play, the Terriers were within three points in the closing minutes but wound up losing by nine.

On Saturday, BU trailed 48-46 with 2:25 left. They lost by eight.

For Jones, the shooting problem and the finishing problem were not mutually exclusive.

“Because we struggled to score,” Jones said, “we didn’t really have the confidence to finish the game the way you need to finish it.”

The Terriers walked into the season more inexperienced than they’ve ever been in 13 seasons under Jones. The head coach was willing to use the youth as a crutch for late-game losses in the first and third games of the season, but by the loss against Maine on December 6, he said he wouldn’t go there anymore.

Now, a month later to the date, BU is suffering from the same deficiency.

“You have to meet it head on,” Jones said. “You have to hold yourself accountable for the mistakes you’ve made in those minutes and those moments.”

The Terriers are 0-2 to start the Patriot League. In both losses, they made less than 20 field goals. In both losses, they couldn’t finish a close game down the stretch.

BU hosts American on Wednesday at 7 p.m. If this BU team is more than this same story, it has to start happening soon.

“We’re going to have to jumpstart that learning curve, because a lot of these games are going to be close games,” Jones said. “And we have to be better.”