Boston College Athletics
Photo by: Wendell Cruz-USA TODAY Sports
December 12, 2023 | Men's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
Eagles showcase their depth in a second half comeback over a long-time rival n Brooklyn
CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Boston College basketball enjoyed a golden era during the first decade of the 2000s. The departure from the Big East to the ACC maintained a level of national dominance that included seven national tournament berths in nine seasons. The Eagles won the 2001 Big East championship and began the 2004-05 season with a 20-0 record. The 2005-06 team advanced to the ACC Tournament finals in the Eagles' first year in their new conference, and the 2006-07 team brought BC to its first Sweet Sixteen berth in 12 years.
What that run - and the subsequent decade-plus to follow - showed was that postseason basketball is not a given. Aside from the NIT berth in 2017-18, Boston College has not really moved the needle when it comes to postseason basketball talk, internally or externally. This past Sunday's win over St. John's may have changed that. The Eagles are now willing to openly talk about potential postseason prospects as long as they're playing up to their own internal expectations.
"We've been through some battles," said head coach Earl Grant, "so maybe that means we're a little battle-tested. Guys showed great resilience, great character. We had a great crowd of BC fans. The biggest thing it says about the program is that we're moving in the right direction."
St. John's isn't a lock for the NCAA Tournament, but the win on Sunday bridged a gap in the conversation between BC and other power conference teams near or at the top quadrant of college basketball's statistical analytics. The Red Storm had entered Brooklyn's Barclays Center as the 57th-ranked team in Ken Pomeroy's "KenPom" rating, and both that and their No. 50 and No. 52 spots in the Torvik and ESPN Basketball Power Index numbers were better than ranking No. 60 in the NCAA's overall NET rating. A previous win over Utah provided the type of Quad 1 win that would eventually help with the Johnnies' postseason candidacy, but their program stood on its own as a perennial power capable of entering the national tournament.
In his first season at St. John's, Rick Pitino was hired to try to restore the Red Storm to its glory years in the 1980's. After a three-season stint at Iona, Pitino took over in Queens looking to return to bigger-time basketball for a team situated in the heart of New York City's basketball Mecca. Like BC, the matchup with the Johnnies was a throwback to the the founding members of the Big East. Aside from the 2018 comeback win at DePaul - part of the new generation of the Big East - BC hadn't beaten one of its old conference mates since a 2015 win over Providence.Â
The teams had nearly-identical records, but St. John's paired the previous win over the Utes with a win at West Virginia while handling two losses to tournament-level teams in Dayton and Michigan. In contrast, BC's loss to Loyola-Chicago was enough to pull the Eagles further down those rankings against the loss to a better-ranked Colorado State team, but the quality of BC's non-conference opponents didn't quite match the Red Storm's analytic strength of schedule. As a result, the Eagles understood that winning this game would allow them to climb the ratings ever slightly while simultaneously damaging a "better team" in those same systems.
"We needed this one,"Â center Quinten Post. "I think everybody kind of knew it. Obviously, we didn't bring it to the guys [in a locker room talk], but we knew that we needed this one."
The climate added layers to the pregame conversation, but the actual game added the appropriate layers of drama to a mid-December matchup. The back-and-forth nature of their respective styles allowed both the Red Storm and the Eagles to gain footholds at various times, and St. John's erased a six-point deficit in the first half before eventually grabbing a double-digit lead in the first five minutes of the second half.
"The first thing that stopped them was a timeout," said Grant, who called a 30-second whistle after Joel Soriano's dunk drove the lead to 10 points. "We called a timeout, which I don't like to call a lot, but they were making a run. We were making ill-advised, self-inflicted wounds, and we needed to regroup. We did change our press attack and found one action on a ball screen that they didn't guard well, but we also made a couple of stops [that led to us] laying it in a few times. All of a sudden, the game was a two-point game. We knew that there would be runs, and we knew they scored a lot off turnovers and second-chance points, so we just cleaned those areas up."
The cleanup included a pair of 3-pointers from Claudell Harris, Jr. and Mason Madsen that sent BC's bench into a tizzy, and a second trey from Harris kept the Eagles and Red Storm trading leads for the next second half stretch. SJU's lead would eventually reach five with under eight minutes remaining, but another scoring push led by Hand and Chas Kelley III shredded hometown hopes for Pitino's crew after Jaeden Zackery was forced to the bench with four fouls.
"My main focus was to lead and be the glue for all the guys on the court," Kelley said. "I know things got rowdy at times, but that's okay. It was okay if we turned it over and they dunked it on us because [I felt] like I would just stay with the guys. We just talked and communicated and got it on defense and said to go get the win."
The win was the perfect entry point for the Eagles' 10-day break for finals and it allowed plenty of followers to openly dream about the possibilities awaiting them once they return to the court for the Lehigh game next week. BC sat at No. 81 in the NCAA NET rankings on Monday night, moving up 15 spots over the first full week of daily updated for the metric. The Eagles also occupied No. 87 in KenPom - improving a Power Conference-best 41 spots from the starting point of the analytical rankings site. Bottom line: it was a win that at least allowed believers to multiply. A win over Rick Pitino struck home with Boston fans, and a win over a tournament-contending team from the Big East opened the door on a conversation worth having.
Does it mean Boston College is a tournament lock on Joe Lunardi's Bracketology big board? Not yet. But it did allow the Eagles and their fans to embrace a swagger that once felt like a cautionary tale: Boston College was once a Northeast power. On Sunday night, Eagles everywhere went to bed feeling like they were one step closer to regaining that mantle.
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What that run - and the subsequent decade-plus to follow - showed was that postseason basketball is not a given. Aside from the NIT berth in 2017-18, Boston College has not really moved the needle when it comes to postseason basketball talk, internally or externally. This past Sunday's win over St. John's may have changed that. The Eagles are now willing to openly talk about potential postseason prospects as long as they're playing up to their own internal expectations.
"We've been through some battles," said head coach Earl Grant, "so maybe that means we're a little battle-tested. Guys showed great resilience, great character. We had a great crowd of BC fans. The biggest thing it says about the program is that we're moving in the right direction."
St. John's isn't a lock for the NCAA Tournament, but the win on Sunday bridged a gap in the conversation between BC and other power conference teams near or at the top quadrant of college basketball's statistical analytics. The Red Storm had entered Brooklyn's Barclays Center as the 57th-ranked team in Ken Pomeroy's "KenPom" rating, and both that and their No. 50 and No. 52 spots in the Torvik and ESPN Basketball Power Index numbers were better than ranking No. 60 in the NCAA's overall NET rating. A previous win over Utah provided the type of Quad 1 win that would eventually help with the Johnnies' postseason candidacy, but their program stood on its own as a perennial power capable of entering the national tournament.
In his first season at St. John's, Rick Pitino was hired to try to restore the Red Storm to its glory years in the 1980's. After a three-season stint at Iona, Pitino took over in Queens looking to return to bigger-time basketball for a team situated in the heart of New York City's basketball Mecca. Like BC, the matchup with the Johnnies was a throwback to the the founding members of the Big East. Aside from the 2018 comeback win at DePaul - part of the new generation of the Big East - BC hadn't beaten one of its old conference mates since a 2015 win over Providence.Â
The teams had nearly-identical records, but St. John's paired the previous win over the Utes with a win at West Virginia while handling two losses to tournament-level teams in Dayton and Michigan. In contrast, BC's loss to Loyola-Chicago was enough to pull the Eagles further down those rankings against the loss to a better-ranked Colorado State team, but the quality of BC's non-conference opponents didn't quite match the Red Storm's analytic strength of schedule. As a result, the Eagles understood that winning this game would allow them to climb the ratings ever slightly while simultaneously damaging a "better team" in those same systems.
"We needed this one,"Â center Quinten Post. "I think everybody kind of knew it. Obviously, we didn't bring it to the guys [in a locker room talk], but we knew that we needed this one."
The climate added layers to the pregame conversation, but the actual game added the appropriate layers of drama to a mid-December matchup. The back-and-forth nature of their respective styles allowed both the Red Storm and the Eagles to gain footholds at various times, and St. John's erased a six-point deficit in the first half before eventually grabbing a double-digit lead in the first five minutes of the second half.
"The first thing that stopped them was a timeout," said Grant, who called a 30-second whistle after Joel Soriano's dunk drove the lead to 10 points. "We called a timeout, which I don't like to call a lot, but they were making a run. We were making ill-advised, self-inflicted wounds, and we needed to regroup. We did change our press attack and found one action on a ball screen that they didn't guard well, but we also made a couple of stops [that led to us] laying it in a few times. All of a sudden, the game was a two-point game. We knew that there would be runs, and we knew they scored a lot off turnovers and second-chance points, so we just cleaned those areas up."
The cleanup included a pair of 3-pointers from Claudell Harris, Jr. and Mason Madsen that sent BC's bench into a tizzy, and a second trey from Harris kept the Eagles and Red Storm trading leads for the next second half stretch. SJU's lead would eventually reach five with under eight minutes remaining, but another scoring push led by Hand and Chas Kelley III shredded hometown hopes for Pitino's crew after Jaeden Zackery was forced to the bench with four fouls.
"My main focus was to lead and be the glue for all the guys on the court," Kelley said. "I know things got rowdy at times, but that's okay. It was okay if we turned it over and they dunked it on us because [I felt] like I would just stay with the guys. We just talked and communicated and got it on defense and said to go get the win."
The win was the perfect entry point for the Eagles' 10-day break for finals and it allowed plenty of followers to openly dream about the possibilities awaiting them once they return to the court for the Lehigh game next week. BC sat at No. 81 in the NCAA NET rankings on Monday night, moving up 15 spots over the first full week of daily updated for the metric. The Eagles also occupied No. 87 in KenPom - improving a Power Conference-best 41 spots from the starting point of the analytical rankings site. Bottom line: it was a win that at least allowed believers to multiply. A win over Rick Pitino struck home with Boston fans, and a win over a tournament-contending team from the Big East opened the door on a conversation worth having.
Does it mean Boston College is a tournament lock on Joe Lunardi's Bracketology big board? Not yet. But it did allow the Eagles and their fans to embrace a swagger that once felt like a cautionary tale: Boston College was once a Northeast power. On Sunday night, Eagles everywhere went to bed feeling like they were one step closer to regaining that mantle.
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