After brutal loss, BU women's basketball responds with flying colors against Yale: 'We know we're better than that'
After a 60-point loss to Harvard last Saturday, the Terriers delivered their best performance of the year in the non-conference finale.
Bella McLaughlin was asked Sunday afternoon how she handled what happened eight days prior, a before-Christmas Saturday that will live in history — and maybe infamy — for Boston University women’s basketball.
Perhaps, after the program’s worst loss by point differential since at least 2009 at cross-town rival Harvard, the sophomore transfer guard and the rest of her young team just wanted to forget about it. Head coach Melissa Graves said the group was already stressed over final exams and homesick at the end of a long semester.
To ignore the 86-26 loss, move on and go enjoy the holidays would’ve been an understandable refrain, for sure.
Well, all of that be damned.
“It’s important to feel it,” McLaughlin said. “If you don’t, you’re not really going to learn from it.”
BU’s point guard — a pseudo-freshman after barely playing at Providence last year — is probably onto something. Because whatever it was the Terriers did over the Christmas break, they returned to walk Yale off its own floor, 77-56, in New Haven on Sunday.
It was only that close because BU (6-5) took its foot off the gas in the second half, certainly an excusable development after a 50-point first-half romp.
“Everybody individually I think was just really taken aback a little bit,” said McLaughlin, who didn’t play (ankle) but was on the bench in the loss to Harvard. “We allowed ourselves to feel it, let it sink in.”
She said BU had two “really, really good practices” after returning from the Christmas break. Graves added BU’s theme of the week was “growth” — “to show how we’ve grown through the non-conference,” despite the loss to the Crimson, which seemed like a big step back. BU’s head coach, always armed with perspective, made sure to partially attribute the loss to injuries (fellow sophomore point guard Aoibhe Gormley missed the game along with McLaughlin), a reminder the players seemed to understand — McLaughlin spoke at length about injuries on Sunday.
“We didn’t have a point guard,” Graves said, chuckling.
Forgiveness and perspective are important — they always are under Graves. But so is accepting a non-sugar-coated reality and turning it into something positive. The balance between the two is how a young team recovers from a 60-point loss.
“We know we’re better than that,” McLaughlin said. “We were more frustrated with our effort than anything, so we let that one sit with us for a couple days, and we’ve come back with a much better focus on what we can do as a team.”
“And we went out and did it.”
That was doing to the Bulldogs a lot of what the Crimson did to them — suffocating an overmatched team defensively, thus making life oh-so-easy at the other end. Despite the season-high 77 points, Graves seemed most pleased with her team’s defense in postgame availability, saying it “ignited our offense a little bit.” The Terriers collected 10 steals, forced 18 turnovers, and in the dominant first half, held Yale to 28 percent shooting.
“It was the turnover piece, but it was also forcing quick and contested shots,” Graves said. “To us, that’s kind of equal to a turnover. And in the first half, we were able to rebound and run out of it.”
The Terriers need to be able to get out and run, because BU’s half-court offense is still an enormous work in progress (see: 20 turnovers per game). Graves knew playing in transition would be her offense’s identity before the year — powered by McLaughlin and Gormley — but across an extended four-game slump prior to Sunday, McLaughlin felt the Terriers had gotten away from who they needed to be.
It all came to a head against Harvard, when BU couldn’t even cross midcourt against the Crimson’s press, let alone push pace in transition.
“We talked about really wanting to find our identity again,” McLaughlin said.
After recording its three lowest-scoring quarters of the season in the same game last Saturday, BU opened with its second-highest and highest-scoring frames Sunday. The Terriers entered averaging a Patriot League-worst 52.8 points per game, then dropped 50 in the first half alone on an astounding 71-percent shooting (including 85 percent (!!) in the second quarter).
McLaughlin (8 points, 2 assists to 1 turnover) led the charge early, running circles around the Bulldogs before Gormley (3 points, 4 assists, 5 steals, no turnovers) came off the bench in her return from a two-game absence and dished out several flashy passes in transition for easy buckets. BU had 14 assists in the opening 20 minutes — that would’ve been its fourth-most in a game this year — and an assist/turnover ratio of 14-5, which would’ve been the Terriers’ best by a lightyear.
“There were some moments of really beautiful basketball,” Graves said.
For reference, BU’s assist/turnover ratio against Harvard was 6-39.
Sure, the drop-off in competition from Harvard (11-1, receiving votes in the AP Top 25 poll) to Yale (1-12, 328th in NET rankings) contributed, but the scale of the Terriers’ improvement from one game to the next was staggering. Besides, BU’s traveled from one end of the spectrum to the other twice already — a 54-point loss to No. 2 UConn into an exhibition with Division II Emmanuel and a 36-point loss to UAlbany into two-win UMass Lowell — and the Terriers didn’t play great in either of those get-right games (despite winning both).
This was growth, a significant step forward for a group that hadn’t played a dominant game since the season opener.
Plus, it’s not like BU just played good defense and spammed buckets in transition. This was a complete performance: the Terriers did whatever they wanted in the post (48 paint points), a staple of Graves’ program that had been missing so far this year. Freshman forwards Allison Schwertner, Channing Warren and junior forward Anete Adler combined for 30 points and 15 rebounds, schooling the smaller Bulldogs with easy seals down low. Warren, who hadn’t played much coming in, erupted for a career-high 15 points.
“They all did a good job of working harder for position,” Graves said. “This was the best game Channing has played as far as her motor and how hard she went. And ever since she came back from break, she’s been practicing that way.”
With McLaughlin and Gormley playing the way they did in transition, BU’s posts taking care of business inside, and All-Patriot League senior guard Alex Giannaros (23 points) doing what she does? Plus a positive assist/turnover ratio?
“Yeah, we’re gonna be really, really good,” Graves said. “We’re gonna be able to score in the 70s.”
Sunday was the first time BU had done that this year and the Terriers couldn’t have picked a better time. Patriot League play begins Thursday at Case Gym against Lafayette.
“The league is very competitive,” Graves said. “We gotta be ready every night.”