The road losses continue to pile up as BU men’s basketball falls at Bucknell
The Terriers trailed wire-to-wire in their seventh consecutive loss away from Case Gym.
As much as head coach Joe Jones will point to other reasons for a loss, Boston University men’s basketball is a different team away from home than it is at Case Gym.
The story was no different on Wednesday night.
BU gave up a straightaway 3 on the game’s opening possession and trailed the rest of the way, falling to Bucknell, 76-60, at Sojka Pavillion in Lewisburg, Pa.
The Terriers (12-14, 6-7 PL) are now 0-7 on the road in Patriot League play and 6-0 at home. It is unexplainable. This is a team that went 5-4 away from home last season with many of the same returning faces. In its 11 Patriot League seasons before this one, BU was 55-44 on the road in conference.
But as much as home wins and road losses have been the story of Jones’ 14th team during conference play, he declined to put much stock into it postgame.
“I think there’s a lot of things that we can control that we’re not controlling, and I’d like to focus on that more than losing a game on the road,” he said.
As Jones put it regarding Wednesday’s loss: “We just didn’t play well.”
BU was on its back foot all game. The Terriers failed to score until five and a half minutes had elapsed.
Jones was then forced to burn a timeout right before the under-12-minute media stoppage. Graduate guard Miles Brewster navigated a screen from freshman forward Ben Defty and left his feet to make a pass to the roll-man. His pass, however, landed on the hardwood behind Defty, who was already rolling to the rim. Bucknell’s Pip Ajayi snagged the loose ball and threw it ahead to Brandon McCreesh for a transition layup.
Bucknell 15, BU 3. Eight minutes in.
A minute and a half later, the Bison led 21-6.
“We didn’t play great out of the gate,” Jones said.
But across the final 10 minutes of the half, BU only allowed one field goal and held the Bison to eight total points.
The Terriers utilized a 2-3 zone that Bucknell seemed unable to solve for the remainder of the half.
“We just kind of fought hard,” said Jones. “Our zone really helped us kind of stay in the game.”
BU trailed 29-24 at halftime despite shooting 30.8 percent from the field.
BU soon cut that deficit to one, when junior forward Otto Landrum drilled a straightaway 3 just over five minutes into the second half.
But after Landrum’s 3, BU’s defense collapsed.
Bucknell scored on 12 of its next 13 trips, stretching its lead to as many as 19 points.
“I thought it was a complete breakdown in the second half of the game, defensively,” Jones said.
Midway through the run, Bucknell star forward Noah Williamson (8 points, 9 rebounds) missed his second free throw. It caromed out to junior Ruot Bijiek. Two passes later, Bison freshman guard Jayden Williams drilled a wide-open 3 from the right wing.
BU hardly allows offensive rebounds. Its defensive rebounding rate ranks sixth in the nation. The Terriers also entered Wednesday’s matchup snagging 10.7 offensive rebounds per game, best in the Patriot League.
But the Bison outrebounded BU, 8-7, on the offensive glass.
“We have 15 offensive rebounds the last time we played them. We had seven tonight. We needed to get to the glass more than we did,” said Jones.
As the Terrier defense collapsed, execution was not much better on the offensive end. The Terriers only scored 10 points in the eight minutes that followed Landrum’s 3.
“We just struggled to score. We couldn’t score at the basket,” Jones said.
BU was outscored 28-20 in the paint. As for its star sophomore guards and two leading scorers, Mike McNair (10 points) only attempted five shots. Kyrone Alexander (4 points) took six.
“We didn’t generate enough shots for our guys,” said Jones.
All night, BU looked stagnant on the offensive end. Too often it was forced into difficult shots late in the shot clock.
The Terriers shot 48.0 percent in the second half but as Jones said postgame, that mark was “maybe a little misleading.”
BU began knocking down shots once the game was already out of reach.
And now, after a game that felt eerily similar to Saturday’s road loss at Holy Cross, a game in which the Terriers fought back to close the deficit before surrendering a game-ending run, BU is just two games away from completing a winless road campaign in the Patriot League.
“Our offense hasn’t been very good the last two games, after scoring 80-something at home,” Jones said with a chuckle. “So we went on the road the last two games, and our offense wasn’t great.”
Offensive struggles are not unique to these last two road games, however. In seven road Patriot League games, the Terriers are scoring just 54.9 points per game.
Luckily for BU, two games at Case Gym are next on the schedule. They’ll revisit the ever-present road struggles on Feb. 22, against first-place American.