BU women's basketball gets close, but sinks further with loss to Navy
The Terriers, who fell to 1-6 in conference, were hampered by two issues they have faced all season: turnovers and defensive rebounding.
BOSTON — When reporters were allowed into the press room above Case Gym on Wednesday, Aoibhe Gormley was already at the dais, frozen and staring into the abyss. For the duration of the press conference, the sophomore point guard sat there, motionless except for a couple moments she leaned forward to grab the stat sheet.
She’s a ruthless competitor, self-prescribed.
“Sometimes it can haunt me,” she told Case In Point before the start of her sophomore season. “Because I take losses very personally.”
Gormley was excellent on Wednesday afternoon. She played one of the better games of an up-and-down year, as did the rest of the Boston University women’s basketball team. But much like Saturday against Army, BU left its matchup against top-Patriot League outfit Navy with nothing to show for an impressive fight. After cutting the Mids’ lead to three with two and a half minutes to play, BU eventually fell, 74-64.
The Terriers are 1-6 in conference and 7-11 overall, on a four-game losing streak and sinking further into the mud during the most challenging season any of them have experienced at BU.
“Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating,” Gormley said, her voice breaking. “We feel like we’re getting close, and it’s just hard not to come away with wins. We still believe that we can do it, we still believe that we can win a championship. I feel like we just need to get the one and build off that.”
They’ve gotten so freakin’ close to getting ‘the one’ these past two outings, giving two of the conference’s best teams everything they could handle, but BU is now a full five games behind the top of the PL over a third of the way through the slate. The Terriers are improving yet simultaneously losing more and more ground.
Head coach Melissa Graves, who had spent exactly three days with a losing conference record at BU before this season, was asked if it's harder for her team to believe it's making progress without a victory to point to.
“I don’t think it’s a ‘believing’ thing,” she said. “They still believe. It’s just the execution piece of it. For this one, it was just down the stretch, last game it was [the fourth] quarter. It’s a progression, we’re not getting blown out. So I don’t think it’s ‘they don’t believe in themselves.’ It’s just trying to push through this hard part right here.”
The things BU was missing early in conference play were consistent focus, energy, and general life, but the Terriers brought all three to this homestand and still couldn’t get over the hump. They still couldn’t fix their turnover and rebounding woes, either, and the search for answers in those two areas continues, suggesting the cause runs much deeper than simple effort.
“I’m not sure,” Gormley said of the reason behind those struggles. “We’ve been trying to do a lot of different things in practice to try to solve these issues. I think part of it is probably being a young team, but at this point in the season, we just got to turn it around.”
Navy took 16 more field goal attempts than BU four days after Army’s margin was plus-15, and the Terriers have now taken 167 fewer shots than their opponents this year.
How hard is it to win a basketball game like that?
“It makes it almost impossible,” Graves said.
The spin zone there is that if BU was only minutes away from winning each game despite those conditions, where would they be if they’d taken as many shots as the Mids and Black Knights? Well, probably 3-4 in the Patriot League. BU’s offense was really, really good on Wednesday, powered by Gormley’s 10 points on perfect shooting, regularly exploiting Navy’s vulnerable defense with dribble drives and post-ups. The Terriers shot 45 percent from the field, their second-highest mark of conference play.
“We shot a higher percentage than them, as you can see,” Graves said.
But Navy made five more field goals, because on the possessions BU’s offense isn’t humming, it’s usually giving the ball away (the Terriers committed 16 turnovers on Wednesday). The Mids found a ton of wide-open 3-pointers — as did Army on Saturday — and made 11 of their 32 looks. BU leads the Patriot League in 3-point attempts allowed during conference play by 26 shots, and Graves was asked postgame if she thinks the Terriers’ defense is giving up too many chances from downtown.
“Part of it is turning it over, and then it’s transition defense,” Graves said. “There was one segment there where we were getting blown up, but it was because we’re not taking care of the ball, and it’s really hard to cover in transition off a turnover.”
During the league slate, BU’s turnovers per game and turnover margin are ninth in the PL, second-worst only to American, which is 0-18. BU allowed 18 offensive rebounds to Navy and is also ninth in rebounding margin during conference play. These are enormous problems only magnified in close games against quality opponents, and still, BU very nearly won each of these past two games.
Graves said BU showed “it could compete for a championship,” against Army and her team was probably even better on Wednesday. That is certainly a positive, especially in a sport with an uncanny ability to turn regular season results on their head in the postseason.
“Everyone on our team still knows, once we get to March, we still feel confident that we can beat anyone in the league,” Gormley said. “Obviously, would be nice to get a higher position, but when it comes down to it, we know we can get wins in March, too.”
The sweet relief of March, and the madness it brings, is one of the only things left for BU to hold onto.