The holidays couldn’t have brought the UMass men’s basketball team a better present.
Senior point guard Noah Fernandes will play Saturday in the Minutemen’s Atlantic 10 opener at Saint Bonaventure (2 p.m. ESPN+). He’s missed the past five games since spraining his ankle at Harvard on Dec. 2. The Mattapoisett native is still the team’s second leading scorer and second in assists.
“He’s gotten through the whole week, still not 100 percent, but like all sprains it eventually gets to a place where if the strength is good and the range of motion is good, which he checks those two boxes,” UMass coach Frank Martin said. “You’re gonna have to deal with some discomfort when you play, that’s kind of the world that sprains brings into people’s lives, so he’s dealing with that, but he’s he’s not limping.”
He’ll be a welcome sight for the Minutemen, who haven’t won against Saint Bonaventure or in Olean, N.Y., since February 2015 (though that victory was vacated by the NCAA Committee on Infractions). They went 3-2 without Fernandes after posting a 7-1 record with him in the lineup.
He’s one of just three UMass players that have faced the Bonnies or visited the Reilly Center along with T.J. Weeks Jr. and Dyondre Dominguez.
conference play, everyone knows it’s just harder in general because most of the time, the league has coaches that have been in it for a while so they all know each other systems have played against each other for a while, studied. They all know almost what you’re going to run before you even run it,” UMass forward Matt Cross said. “I think it’s much harder, but at the same time, most of the coaches have been doing it for a while and it just makes it that much funner in practice with game planning and stuff like that.”
The trip is fresh for Martin, who spent the previous decade at South Carolina in the SEC and coached in the Big 12 at Kansas State before that. But he knows what conference play is all about.
“We’re going to learn each other. But that’s where league play gets so difficult because as coaches we don’t deviate from who we are. We’re going to coach ball the way that we like ball being played, and we know our tendencies so it’s a little easier to prepare our teams when you know what the opposing guys are going to do,” Martin said. “The league teams, you can play them every year. There’s a respect factor there that everybody carries with them. That’s kind of taken to a different level.”
St. Bonaventure (6-7) has lost its last four games and only scored more than 60 points once in that stretch. Daryl Banks III leads the Bonnies and ranks 10th in the conference averaging 15.6 points per game. His running mate Kyrell Luc puts up 14 points per contest, while Yann Farrell grabs 7.5 rebounds per game, fifth in the league.
“It’s gonna be one of the better coached teams that we play against. Mark (Schmidt), I want to say he’s the godfather of the Atlantic 10 coaches right now,” Martin said. “They’ve built a program that’s about winning here. He’s got a bunch of new guys – like we all do – and trying to make those parts connect while we understand them is the challenge that we’re all dealing with. They’ve got some explosive guards. Those two guys can score and they both play with athleticism and pop and feel.”
Martin also identifies parts of St. Bonaventure’s program he wants UMass to uphold.
“They play old-fashioned basketball, which is what I love. They’re going to stress our defense because they still set screens other than ball screens, and I know this watching them preparing the play has actually been fun to watch because it’s the way I enjoy basketball being played,” Matin said. “We’ve got a challenge on our hands.”
Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter
@kylegrbwsk.