After home loss to Colgate, it’s getting late early for BU women’s basketball
Fifteen games into the season, the Terriers are still riding the roller coaster — and their coach knows time is running out.
A couple weeks before the start of her fourth season coaching the Boston University women’s basketball team, Melissa Graves sat in her office and made a roller coaster motion with her hands. “I expect a lot of this,” she declared, and she did not appear at all spooked by the prospect.
After all, she was just doing the math. A roster of three-quarters underclassmen and seven new players, plus a full season of college basketball, would equal inconsistency. She had run the same numbers a year before, and when her hunch materialized in the middle of Patriot League play, she stayed calm, knocked some perspective into her team and led them all the way to the title game.
It was a remarkable run, one Graves eventually admitted she didn’t think should’ve been possible. But this is what Graves does, and she seemed almost excited at the idea of riding the roller coaster again.
The things she would do to get off it now.
In one of her franker press conferences as BU’s head coach after a 61-49 loss to Colgate on Saturday afternoon, Graves’ sentiment boiled down quite simply: The Terriers are still inconsistent, they still know they’re inconsistent, they’re still talking about how they’re inconsistent and, quite soon, they actually need to do something about it.
“I do attribute a big piece of it to youth and newness to the program, but at the end of the day, you get to a point where those excuses can’t matter anymore and you just got to get it done,” Graves said. “We’re at that point now.”
BU (7-8, 1-3 PL) has now gone past Jan. 11 without winning consecutive games, and perhaps the even bigger problem is that it’s not even the same problems causing the Terriers’ inconsistency anymore. Turnovers and rebounding clipped BU’s wings in non-conference, but the silver lining there was that at least Graves’ team knew exactly what it needed to solve. Both of those things got better in the first three games of conference play, only for BU to drop the first two because it started flat and got blown out in the first half, but again, at least the Terriers knew the issue.
Then Saturday happened.
BU was excellent in the first quarter and led at the half, only for the turnovers to return and a second-half collapse — which hasn’t been a concern once this year — to suddenly arrive. Finishing layups was a problem, which has been a common issue, but making wide-open 3s was also a problem, which hasn’t. Furthermore, BU defended well throughout non-conference, then stopped guarding for most of the first three Patriot League games, and on Saturday, its defense was amazing and ugly within the same 40 minutes.
“It’s frustrating for us, because we are so aware of what our potential is,” sophomore guard Bella McLaughlin (team-leading 12 points) said. “Sometimes we can put it together and sometimes we can’t.”
Said Graves: “We need to really figure out a piece of, ‘How do we put 40 minutes together?’ Because we play really well in these small spurts, but then we have these lapses of focus and lock in and things like that.”
When things got bad last year — BU lost three in a row in the middle of the conference slate and fell below .500 in PL, both for the first time under Graves — the Terriers’ coach remained steadfast that her team was, for all intents and purposes, fine. The slump peaked after a home loss to Bucknell on Feb. 10, and in postgame availability afterwards, Graves was notably calm.
Though Saturday’s loss was almost a month earlier in the season than that one, it already feels like the clock is ticking on Graves’ fourth team at Case Gym.
“You start to realize we’re going to start running out of chances at some point to actually do what we say we need to do,” Graves said.
So successful to start her career at BU partly because of her temperament, Graves did anything she could to steer her young roster away from the panic button a year ago. It worked flawlessly. But after the Terriers fell to 1-3 in conference play on Saturday — BU started 4-0, 4-0 and 3-1 her first three seasons — even Graves admitted to losing patience at times. She’s been more animated during games this year, which was positive in the beginning — because her young team had the maturity to take the heat — but it isn’t exactly a fun quirk of this new group anymore.
“At this point, there’s pieces of the game where I felt like I was patient and ‘Hey, it’s okay, we got this,’” Graves said. “But not in the moments where I just draw up a play, we come out, we don’t run it correctly.”
Ultimately, Graves’ BU is in uncharted territory, and if the Terriers don’t find their way out of it soon, a wide-open conference with a plethora of strong teams will quickly leave them behind.
“For me personally, I’m just trying to work on the things that I individually need to work on so I can contribute to the team in a big way, and I think we all need to do that,” McLaughlin said. “We love each other enough, we hang out with each other all the time off the court. Everybody, as coach said, has said ‘lock in’ a lot. I think everybody needs to spend some time with themselves, with their position coaches, getting better at those things mentally and physically.”
It isn’t just one problem, nor is it just one person. Everything and everyone is inconsistent at the moment — even senior captain and All-Patriot League guard Alex Giannaros shot poorly and fouled out on Saturday — and it's clear that just talking about it isn’t enough.
“I wholeheartedly believe that we’re going to come out of this, and we’re going to find ourselves on the back end of conference doing much better than we are now,” McLaughlin said. “It just takes a lot of focus and effort now to get to the place we want to go.”
Added Graves: “I do believe it’s early enough for us to turn this around. I don’t feel like our time is up, I don’t feel like that at all. And I believe in this team, I think we’re so talented.”
She may feel that way, but for the first time possibly ever during her four years on Comm. Ave, Melissa Graves admitted BU women’s basketball is running out of time.
