BU women's basketball falls at Lehigh, 62-44, in PL quarterfinal
The Terriers failed to reach the semifinal for the first in head coach Melissa Graves' four seasons.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — In the locker room 10 minutes before the Patriot League quarterfinal, the Boston University women’s basketball team sang the chorus to “Hey Baby,” the song BU’s pep band plays at Case Gym after every home win.
These Terriers have been a different team at home all season, and never was it more obvious than on Feb. 26, when BU dropped 80 points on the Patriot League leaders and ended Lehigh’s 12-game winning streak.
But on Monday night at Stabler Arena, faced once again with the daunting task of conquering the top-seeded Mountain Hawks, this time on the road with its season on the line, the BU team that had made the impossible feel possible didn’t show up.
The eighth-seeded Terriers fell, 62-44, to conclude a disappointing season in which fourth-year head coach Melissa Graves failed to make the PL semifinal for the first time.
Ultimately, while Lehigh — one of the more dominant PL teams in recent memory — was a team BU proved it could beat, the Terriers have been a shell of themselves all year on the road. And in a hostile environment on Monday, BU started flat, appeared to lack confidence and looked exhausted by the second quarter.
The Terriers finished the year 5-11 on the road, without a victory over an above-.500 opponent.
Whereas BU erupted to a 21-11 lead at the end of the first quarter in the home win over Lehigh — eventually taking a 23-point lead midway through the second — the Terriers made only four field goals in the opening frame on Monday. BU’s offense was stagnant early, and players appeared to miscommunicate on the play being run on multiple occasions. Lehigh led 16-10 after the first, and the Terriers were chasing the game against the highest-scoring team in the conference from there.
A big reason BU pulled off the upset in late February was because it was able to push pace in transition after Lehigh’s misses, but on Monday, the Mountain Hawks were the team flying up and down the court.
Lehigh found open layups in transition after BU makes multiple times in the first half. And when the Terriers went on a brief surge midway through the second quarter, cutting the Hawks’ lead to four, Lehigh immediately went on an 10-2 run, mostly by pushing pace offensively.
The Terriers, who played an eight-player rotation, just couldn’t keep up.
Still, BU only trailed by 11 at the half, only for a disastrous third quarter to put the game out of reach.
In the first six minutes of that frame, the Terriers only scored five points — off a stepback mid-ranger and a stepback 3-pointer from leading-scorer Alex Giannaros (7 points). BU fell behind by as many as 19 points.
Turnovers were a consistent issue, as BU finished with 19 against a team that forced a league-leading 18.2 per game during the conference regular season. The Terriers took 12 fewer field-goal attempts as a result, despite shooting a higher percentage (38 percent) than Lehigh (35), a trend Graves has bemoaned all season.
BU’s 44 points were its fewest of conference play; its 19 turnovers were its fourth-worst mark.
Graves and her team have said the defense needs to spark the offense all season, but they’ve often noted after losses their poor offense was actually hurting their defense. That was the case on Monday, as Lehigh finished with 21 points off turnovers to the Terriers’ six. BU was fortunate the Mountain Hawks shot only 5 of 23 from downtown (sharpshooter Ella Stemmer was 1 of 10), otherwise the Terriers’ leaky transition defense could’ve cost them a lot more.
Freshman forward Allison Schwertner led BU with 10 points on 4 of 6 shooting.