ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Tre Mitchell rose up to block Robert Carpenter’s layup attempt and swatted the ball away from the rim. It fell perfectly into Dibaji Walker’s hands, but before the sophomore could do anything with it, Justin Winston ripped it out of Walker’s grasp and drew a foul on Walker.
It wasn’t a play that made a tremendous difference in the game, but it epitomized the issues UMass had Wednesday in its 74-61 loss to St. Bonaventure. The Minutemen were soft and weak on the interior when St. Bonaventure came on the attack hunting for the ball. The Bonnies only forced 11 turnovers in the game, but that didn’t include the numerous times they simply ripped rebounds away from the UMass player going up for a missed shot.
“There’s no play, there’s no scheme you can do for that, you just have to face up, rip through and don’t allow that to happen,” UMass coach Matt McCall said.
The toughness plays have become the metric McCall uses to talk about the slim margin for error his team has in the Atlantic 10. He said his team needs to play tougher, but also make the type of toughness plays that aren’t about strength. It’s mental toughness plays like not leaving dangerous shooters open in transition defense or understanding how to defend simple pick-and-roll actions.
Those are the things UMass hasn’t done lately, and certainly didn’t do against St. Bonaventure. It’s an issue that both players and coaches say needs to be corrected at practice, but perhaps more appropriately needs to translate from practice to the games. Although the Minutemen’s practices are closed, there are sounds of intensity and enthusiasm coming from the court, but that hasn’t been evident when the ball is tipped in games.
“It starts in practice, we need to be more intense than we’ve been recently,” Mitchell said. “There are times when we’ll get into it in practice but we won’t let it translate onto the floor. We’ve got to come out and when we get hit, we’ve got to hit back. We have to be able to come back swinging and no matter how many times we get hit, always hit back.”
Part of what McCall wants to do moving forward is find ways to make practice more difficult for his players and seek out methods to put more stress on them. He said he wants to create more game-like situations where there is nothing players can do except move on if they feel there are bad calls from the officials.
“We’ve got to go back to practice and compete,” McCall said. “As a staff, we need to create as much adversity as we can and see how they respond. Responding the right way is not talking back and moving on to the next play.”
LOCKDOWN DIALLO — Kyle Lofton might have led St. Bonaventure with 19 points, but he was ineffective when matched up against Samba Diallo. The sophomore forward kept pace with the Bonnies’ sophomore point guard when he was guarding him in the second half and made life difficult.
Lofton played 39 minutes, but went scoreless for the last 10 minutes of the game when Diallo was the primary player guarding him.
“He took pride in staying down and trying to keep him in front,” McCall said.
ROAD WOES — Wednesday’s loss was UMass’ 19th consecutive Atlantic 10 defeat on the road. It moves McCall’s conference record on the road to 1-20 and drops the third-year coach to 3-28 overall in true road games with the Minutemen.
BONNIES TROUBLE — St. Bonaventure has now won eight straight and 12 of the past 14 against UMass.