BU women's basketball dealt another blow in blowout loss to Harvard: 'We gotta move on'
Two games before the start of conference play, the Terriers suffered their worst defeat of an inconsistent season thus far.
The worrying part for Boston University women’s basketball is not that it just drove a few minutes up the road and got detonated by Harvard, falling to 5-5 in its penultimate game of the non-conference slate.
No, no. After all: that result was both expected and excusable, given the Terriers — already struggling to find a consistently coherent offense — didn’t have a healthy point guard against the 11-1 Crimson. The AP Top 25 Poll will tell you Harvard is around the 35th-best team in the country right now, and BU — a young Patriot League outfit not exactly using the non-conference slate to build an at-large case — was without sophomore guards Aoibhe Gormley and Bella McLaughlin, who run its offense.
Sure. The score was 86-26. But BU, through little fault of its own, was doomed from the start.
The part worth stressing about, however, is that now just one game before the start of conference play, the Terriers don’t appear to be getting better. And that is what the non-conference slate was supposed to be for.
For argument’s sake, let’s group Saturday’s matchup against Harvard with the two toughest tests BU had faced beforehand — a 76-32 home loss to UAlbany on Dec. 10 and an 86-32 road defeat to No. 2 UConn in BU’s second game of the season. Within those three games, you could make the case BU played best — or at least emerged feeling the best — after the loss to the Huskies.
It was supposed to be the other way around.
Think about it this way: Imagine being there on Nov. 7, when BU fell by 54 points to the 11-time national champions, and suggesting that it would lose by six more to an Ivy League opponent over a month later.
Look at it through the lens of BU’s biggest flaw — turnovers — and it’s the same story. Against UConn, BU committed 33 turnovers, what felt at the time like a prohibitive season-high. Versus UAlbany, the Terriers’ assist-turnover ratio was 3-to-20, which Graves said was a “crazy ratio.” On Saturday? BU shattered both, turning it over 39 times and dishing out only six assists.
Granted — losing both Gormley and McLaughlin changes everything; proceedings on Saturday would never have been so bad with them on the floor. Also, BU is by no means the first team to get run off the floor by Harvard; Maine and Northeastern are among the Crimson’s victims, and the Terriers beat both those teams earlier this season.
Still, there’s no avoiding where BU is at right now. The Terriers simply aren’t building momentum in non-conference that a young roster could really use come the conference gauntlet.
“I thought we were progressing before this game, [but], you know, this was a hard game for us,” head coach Melissa Graves said.
BU has only won consecutive games once. The Terriers haven’t spent their non-conference schedule solving their flaws, they’ve spent it keeping their heads above water. And while yes, BU’s done that remarkably well (it hasn’t loss twice in a row yet), the Terriers can’t just survive forever. The thrive part’s got to come eventually.
Which is why BU’s last three games have been especially frustrating. The Terriers’ turnover problem — plus their other major flaw, defensive rebounding — reached a boiling point against UAlbany. BU responded with an encouraging step forward in a furious second half against UMass Lowell, only to fall back even deeper into the mud on Saturday. (Adding to the season-high 39 turnovers, BU surrendered a season-high 19 offensive rebounds to Harvard.)
“It’s just boxing out and taking care of the basketball. It’s the same things we’ve been talking about throughout the year,” Graves said.
Again, an injury-riddled BU faced an uphill battle against the Crimson, who were forcing a staggering 21.55 turnovers (35th in the country) and collecting 12.4 offensive boards per game coming in.
But Patriot League play — when wins and losses start mattering for BU — is less than two weeks away. How is a young team supposed to enter it with any kind of confidence when its two biggest problems crescendoed only two games prior?
“There’s nothing we can get back from this game,” Graves said. “We gotta move on.”
BU finishes its non-conference slate on the road at Yale next Sunday, a game that suddenly feels quite significant — the Terriers risk dropping two games in a row for the first time this season right as PL play begins. And BU desperately needs at least Gormley or McLaughlin to return for it.
Because the bottom line, right now: BU’s arrow isn’t pointing in the right direction and, in two game’s time, that’s going to start to matter.
“Something’s gotta give where we do turn the ship a little bit,” Graves said.