Men’s Basketball: Otto Landrum turns in career day as BU upsets Lafayette
Featured image by Jacob Ireland
By Brendan Galvin
When you’re at rock bottom, the only way is up.
After an abysmal game on Wednesday night against Army, a game in which it was outscored by 17 points in the second half, there weren’t many bright spots for the Boston University men’s basketball heading into their weekend matchup against undefeated-in-conference Lafayette.
Enter Otto Landrum.
In his second straight game coming off the bench after starting every game prior to Wednesday, he presented his case for being inserted back into the starting five.
Landrum poured in a career-high and a team-season-high 26 points en route to a huge 62-48 victory for the Terriers (8-13, 3-5 PL) on the road at Lafayette (8-13, 7-1 PL) on Saturday.
It was a defensive battle throughout the game, with the Terriers forcing 14 turnovers and giving the ball up 11 times themselves. With neither team having a scorer averaging more than 10 points, someone had to step up.
Just one game after going scoreless (0-for-4 FG) in 21 minutes of play, Landrum responded with a career game. In addition to his 26 points, he hauled in nine rebounds and sent back three shots, turning the Leopards over twice.
The Terriers were without senior Anthony Morales for a second straight game, and taking into consideration big men sophomore Malcolm Chimezie and senior Andrew Patnode already out due to injury, BU was low in size.
“The history of our program since I’ve been here, has been somebody goes down, somebody always has stepped up, when we’ve needed it,” said BU head coach Joe Jones. “Sometimes, somebody’s loss is somebody else’s gain when we have a lot of good players.”
That was the story of Saturday’s game from the Terriers, with junior guards Ethan Okwuosa and Ben Palacios supporting Landrum’s effort. Okwousa scored seven points and brought in five boards, while Palacios scored eight, going 2-for-3 from deep.
Jones was proud of the team’s success, but wants to continue to change the team’s plan of attack away from shooting almost 24 threes per game, and making only about seven.
“We’re just trying to change our identity a little bit and get them focused on more of the things that give you a chance to play with more force offensively,” he said.
What made the difference in the end between BU and Lafayette was the Terriers finally, finally, playing a complete, 40-minute game. Too many times this year the team has squandered a second-half lead after playing a strong first half on both sides of the ball.
BU led by seven going into the half against Army, only to give up that lead and put themselves in a hole too deep to dig themselves out of.
On Saturday, every punch Lafayette threw was answered with a punch of the Terriers’ own. When senior guard Kyle Jenkins knocked down a 3 to cut the Terrier lead to just six with seven minutes to go, freshman wing Matai Baptiste answered with a 3 of his own on the other side of the court, and scored a minute later to bring BU’s lead back to 11.
“Tonight, we were just much better, more locked into what we needed to do to win. We just played with more force,” Jones said.
The Terriers have some much-needed confidence heading into a showdown with Holy Cross, who sits just one game behind BU in the Patriot League standings.
“We have to learn how to play more to our strengths as a team, and then we got to be the toughest team in the league,” Jones said. “We’ve got to be willing to sacrifice and fight and scrap defensively, and if we can do that, we can play with anybody.”