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Post by tastylicks on Oct 29, 2021 10:04:06 GMT -5
Very good article just came out in The Athletic's College Basketball section this morning. You will need a subscription but its worth it. -- How St. Bonaventure defied trends and built an old (and very good) team in out-of-the-way Oleantheathletic.com/2920019/2021/10/29/how-st-bonaventure-defied-trends-and-built-an-old-and-very-good-team-in-out-of-the-way-olean/ Some of the author's exaggerations I dont entirely agree with, namely that its " almost unfathomable" that a core group of dedicated teammates would want to stick together and do something special together. To me that is fathomable and often the story of what highly effective people do, but anyway, it is a fantastic read on Lofton/Osunniyi and Coach Schmidt's mindset. -- This quote from Osun Osunniyi should be printed in large font, laminated and brought to recruiting visits for years to come: “ When I came in on my visit he laid out a blueprint for me,” Osunniyi said. “ His plans for me, how I could produce, how I would get better. I believed him, and stuck with him, and he hasn’t done me wrong. I’m a senior now, and I have a chance to make lot of money playing basketball. Coach Schmidt, he’s just a genius when it comes to basketball. He knows how to make players. He knows how to make pros.” |
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Post by cape3040 on Oct 29, 2021 13:48:48 GMT -5
Great article from major sports publication. This will be a fun year in Olean.
How St. Bonaventure defied trends and built an old (and very good) team in out-of-the-way Olean
DAYTON, OH - MARCH 14: St. Bonaventure Bonnies forward Osun Osunniyi (21) celebrates a play during the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament championship game between the VCU Rams and the Dayton Flyers on March 14, 2021 at UD Arena in Dayton, Ohio. (Photo by Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
By Eamonn Brennan 7h ago 20
Mark Schmidt almost couldn’t believe it. Social life. Imagine it! It was the spring of 2007, he was the brand new head men’s basketball coach at St. Bonaventure, and he exuded that trademark hard-charging enthusiasm, the tireless impatience of the young coach. Schmidt was obsessed with basketball; it was what mattered; he hadn’t uprooted his life and moved to Olean, N.Y., because of any interest in extracurricular activities. He wanted to coach kids and win games. What more was there?
Schmidt was in his new office, doing what new coaches do — putting framed memorabilia up on the wall, mapping out roster plans on a whiteboard, whatever — when one of the St. Bonaventure players, one recruited by Schmidt’s predecessor, knocked on the door. He told Schmidt he intended to transfer. Schmidt wanted to know why. The player told Schmidt he wanted a “better social life.”
“I couldn’t kick him out of my office fast enough,” Schmidt says now. “That’s why I’m the coach! That’s why the previous staff got fired! Because you have players that are more worried about their social life than basketball.”
It was, almost certainly, Schmidt’s first experience of the benefit (yes, the benefit) of the St. Bonaventure basketball program’s environmental situation, which is to say the benefit (yes, the benefit) of Olean, N.Y., population 13,437: self-selection. To outsiders, it has long been easy to see a small rural town in New York’s southern tier as a contextual detriment, a recruiting hurdle to be overcome. What about football weekends? To Schmidt, it has, from the beginning, been a helpful tool, a winnowing fork separating the wheat from the chaff. Do you want to be here? Do you like to work? Do you have a plan to develop yourself into a pro? (Because we do.) Mostly, what’s important to you? Why?
“There’s this misconception that there’s nothing to do in Olean; there’s plenty to do in Olean,” he says. “There may not be 25 clubs, but there are a couple. But there are no distractions. There’s no shuffle to get caught up in, because there is no shuffle.
“This is a place where basketball is everything. If you’re a basketball player, this is it. If you don’t love it, this is not the right place for you.”
To be a basketball player is to love it, in other words, and not everybody is a Basketball Player, capital B, capital P. It sounds simple, and it is. It also, for a certain kind of kid, simply works. It is an approach Schmidt has stuck by for a decade and a half now; he is no longer a quote-unquote young coach, and he has calmed in the way so many coaches do, but his fundamental take on his program hasn’t wavered. The counterintuitive insight still works.
Indeed, now more than ever, St. Bonaventure’s self-sorting sustainability is core to its success. It is the same framework that harnessed players who wanted to do little else besides play basketball together, and thus produced the best team in the Atlantic 10 a season ago, twin champions of the regular season and the A-10 tourney, one of the best non-power-conference teams in the country. It is the emotional idea at the center of a team that, despite two years of unprecedented transfer movement and roster turnover in college basketball, returns all five senior starters to little old Olean again. The Bonnies will begin the year at No. 23 in the Associated Press Top 25, their first preseason ranking in over 50 years. They enter the season with sights set on far more than simply making the ninth NCAA Tournament appearance in program history. Their expectations are well-founded. Schmidt has built one of the best teams in college basketball not in spite of where his school is located, but in many ways because of it.
The breakthrough for Schmidt at St. Bonaventure — the sliding doors moment for the rest of his tenure, maybe, even if no one necessarily realized it at the time — came just a few months after the “social life” story Schmidt still tells to this day. The Bonnies program had been a talent dead zone for years, thanks to a 2003 scandal in which a junior college player, Jamil Terrell, had been approved to play despite not having the required degree. (Terrell had a certificate in welding instead.) Not only was basketball coach Jan van Breda Kolff fired, both the athletic director and the university’s president resigned. (From a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette news story at the time: “As the shock waves of a basketball scandal continued to roll across the campus of St. Bonaventure University, shaken students, employees and townspeople gathered last night to try to put the pieces back together. ‘Our Franciscan values will prevail above the transgressions of a few,’ trustees chairman William E. Swan told a crowd of about 800. ‘We will not sacrifice our values for anything — not even athletic glory.'” This was a big deal.) The scandal led to scholarship reductions, and coach Anthony Solomon won just 24 games in four thankless seasons at the school.
Then Schmidt saw Andrew Nicholson. In October 2007, Nicholson, an unknown, barely regarded prospect from Toronto, committed to St. Bonaventure. Nicholson was 6-foot-9 with long arms, but basically no one was recruiting him; he had just picked basketball up in high school, and ankle injuries had limited his ability to play on the grassroots circuit. But when Schmidt saw Nicholson play, he was blown away. Before anyone else, he and his assistant coach, Jeff Massey, knew they’d found an immediate starter, maybe even a future pro. Finding Nicholson, and then landing his commitment, was the stuff of mid-major coaches’ dreams, the reason guys in dri-fit polos spend countless hours watching random kids at summer events, grinding through player evaluations. Sometimes you hit the jackpot.
Nicholson was as good as advertised, the A-10 rookie of the year and, eventually, the interior rock of the Bonnies’ 2011-12 NCAA Tournament team, the first of Schmidt’s tenure and the school’s first in 12 years. Then, Nicholson went pro, was drafted 19th overall, and built a solid NBA career. All of a sudden, Schmidt had proof for recruits: Come here, put your head down, work hard, and I can get you to the league.
The years since Nicholson’s departure have not been a steady cavalcade of nonstop success, but relative to any reasonable expectation, they’ve been pretty good. After Nicholson’s departure, there were a couple of years without the postseason, but just one sub-.500 finish, and Bona won the A-10 and just barely missed out on the NCAA Tournament in 2015-16. Two years later, they went 26-8, beating UCLA in the First Four and sending star guard (and A-10 player of the year) Jaylen Adams to the NBA. “You can build on the success you have building pros,” Schmidt said. “Kids want to be pros.”
Those successes, collective and individual, laid the foundation for the current team to blossom into what it has become. Kyle Lofton and Osun Osunniyi were both high school students at Putnam Science Academy in Putnam, Conn. They had their own respective recruiting situations, but above all they really wanted to play together. Both wanted to be professionals. Osunniyi, with his 6-foot-10 size and super-long arms, had offers from Syracuse and Georgetown, and traditionally kids do not choose St. Bonaventure over Syracuse or Georgetown. But what about Lofton?
“When I came in on my visit he laid out a blueprint for me,” Osunniyi said. “His plans for me, how I could produce, how I would get better. I believed him, and stuck with him, and he hasn’t done me wrong. I’m a senior now, and I have a chance to make lot of money playing basketball. Coach Schmidt, he’s just a genius when it comes to basketball. He knows how to make players. He knows how to make pros.” When Lofton and Osunniyi committed, alongside three-star freshman Dominick Welch, Schmidt landed the best recruiting class in St. Bonaventure history. “We always talked about playing together, staying here, being together,” Lofton said. Four years later, all three remain.
Not that it has been smooth sailing all along. Indeed, Lofton, Welch and Ossuniyi’s introduction to college basketball went about as badly as any of them could have possibly imagined. In November 2019, St. Bonaventure traveled to the Cayman Islands for an early-season tournament. They played Georgia State (KenPom rank: 124th), Boise State (139th) and Akron (108th). They lost all three by a combined score of 208-166. They started the season 1-5. In mid-January, they were 6-12. Then, just like that, came the green shoots: The Bonnies would go on to win 12 of their final 16 games, make it to the Atlantic 10 tournament final, and narrowly lose to Saint Louis 55-53. They ended up a bucket away from the NCAA Tournament. Lofton immediately played a ton of minutes, and effectively so. He was voted captain by his teammates before the season even began. Welch’s return from injury exactly coincided with the team’s improvement. Ossuniyi posted the seventh-highest blocks percentage in all of Division I that season; he was an even better defender than advertised, and everyone around the program already thought he’d be pretty good.
Schmidt remembers talking to longtime official Jamie Luckie before the Atlantic 10 title game. Lucky had also been in the Cayman Islands. “He comes up to me before the game and says, ‘I could never, ever have imagine you would be in this game,'” Schmidt said. “That’s when we knew those three guys were going to be the leaders of our program.”
Kyle Lofton has been named first team All-Atlantic 10 each of the past two seasons. (David Kohl / USA Today)
Of course, it’s one thing to say that; more than a few mid-major programs think they’ve found the “core” of their future in any given year, only to watch their best players, their leaders, systematically peeled away by up-transfers to high-major schools. From the outside it does feel, in this day and age, like a bit of a miracle that this hasn’t happened to this Bonaventure group, that Osunniyi wasn’t lured to a star role at some ambitious ACC or Big Ten program. After that near brush with an unlikely tournament run as freshmen, Lofton, Osunniyi Welch and classmate Jaren Holmes had a just-OK sophomore season, when they lost three of their first four games (including to Ohio, Vermont, Siena and Canisius, essentially tanking their at-large bid hopes then and there) before finishing with the 12th-ranked per-possession defense in the Atlantic 10. If there had been a time to jump ship, it might have been the summer of 2020, after a disappointing year, when the future of the sport was in doubt, when the Atlantic 10’s cautious approach to a full 2020-21 season added to that uncertainty, and when basically everyone was being granted a waiver to transfer immediately, given the circumstances.
By all accounts, basically no one considered it. All of the reasons that got those players to Olean in the first place remained as valid as ever. They would work hard, remain as assiduously focused on basketball improvement as ever, get Miami of Ohio transfer Jalen Adaway on the floor, and give it another go in 2020-21.
It paid off. Even in a shortened season, one in which Bona managed to play two nonconference games, it was incredibly obvious who the best team in the league was. Adaway added a versatile quasi-four who could rebound both ends, stretch the floor, and maintain space for Ossuniyi, the perfect glue guy for this squad. The 174th-best adjusted efficiency defense turned into one ranked 20th. Lofton, who has played huge minutes since he arrived, led the nation in percentage of available minutes played, at 96.0. None of St. Bonaventure’s starting five averaged less than 82.4. Ossuniyi put up another commanding defensive performance — if he’s not the best interior eraser in college hoops at this stage, he’s close — and Holmes and Welch carried the A-10’s best perimeter shooting offense, one that made 37.5 percent of its 3s.
Thanks to the consolidated calendar, the Bonnies won just 16 games, but their winning percentage and end-of-year adjusted efficiency ranking — No. 32 overall — suggests this was the program’s best team in the past quarter-century. It was a whirring machine, a finely balanced creation four years in the making.
It was also, in a modern college basketball context, too good to last. The summer of 2021 brought immediate transfer eligibility; surely one of these five starters, one of this program’s stars, would be lured away from Schmidt, away from Olean, like the thousands of other kids who put their name in the transfer portal.
“I didn’t have one conversation with that starting five about coming back,” Schmidt said. “Not one. When you have guys that like playing together, understand what they’re playing for, they know a lot can happen if we stick together.”
“We like it here,” Lofton said. “We never wanted to take a different way out. We wanted to pave the way.”
The core question is where this Bonnies group goes from here. There is an assumption about veteran teams — especially teams that can boast the return of five senior starters — that experience is a win unto itself, that improvement is a given, that more wins and a higher tournament seed are a matter of a mere inertia. Things do not always work this way. Schmidt has spent a steady chunk of his offseason talking to coaches about how to avoid what Pat Riley famously dubbed “the disease of me” — players being unaccustomed to sudden success, to feeling slighted or underappreciated, of working hard just to outshine a teammate, rather than to support them. Schmidt has gone through all of the various permutations, played them out in his head and tried to see how they might form in his group, and he’s had a hard time feeling these scenarios are remotely likely.
“I don’t see any of that,” he said. “I see guys that are really motivated, that see that it’s going to be harder than last year because we have the target on our chest. And they’ve worked their tails off. If they don’t get better, it won’t be because they were complacent.”
Mark Schmidt is 242-185 in 14 seasons at St. Bonaventure. (David Kohl / USA Today)
There has been a healthy amount of turnover in the squad, anyway, if not among the starting five. Sixth man Alejandro Vasquez understandably didn’t see a pathway to more minutes, and understandably decided to transfer somewhere he would play. (In his case, Tarleton State.) Jalen Shaw, the seventh member of Schmidt’s 2020-21 rotation, also left. In the meantime, Schmidt was hardly averse to adding players through the portal. He signed 6-foot-8 junior Karim Coulibaly from Pittsburgh, who played starter’s minutes in the ACC a season ago, and who represents a like-for-like replacement for Ossuniyi if and when the big man needs a breather (or just finds himself in foul trouble). This is bigger than it sounds; SBU’s splits with and without Ossuniyi on the floor a season ago were drastically different, and getting similar personnel in that position should shore up that gap. Quadry Adams was a little-used substitute at Wake Forest a year ago, and so shouldn’t be averse to playing minimal minutes in a tight rotation, but he does represent long-term upside. Junior college transfer Linton Brown shot 48.3 percent from 3 a season ago.
Really, though, the big question about the 2021-22 Bonnies is whether this five-man core, so methodically constructed and improved in stages throughout the past four years, can take one more step together. There are areas to tighten up. This team could shoot the ball better if it had more than Holmes and Welch as weapons on the perimeter, but also St. Bonaventure finished 12th in the A-10 in 2-point field goal percentage a season ago. On shots around the rim, per Hoop-Math.com, St. Bonaventure shot just 57.2 percent, a number where marginal improvement could produce a disproportionate gain in offensive efficiency.
Whatever minor concerns there are about stagnation or overfamiliarity or whatever, those spaces for improvement are clear. Most of all, though, is the benefit of continuity. “Even within the five starters, we don’t have anybody that’s trying to do anything different than last year,” Lofton said. “We all want to have the same roles, and it’s about going and being better within those roles.” Rest assured: All five starters have been in the gym all summer, able to practice and play pick up and fully go hard after last year’s sporadic masked-up workouts, at all hours of the day. They are all gym rats. They have to be.
Their collective continuity is a rare luxury in the college basketball of 2021. It is, for a school of Bonaventure’s size — despite its relative success under Schmidt and its status in a high-end mid-major league like the A-10 — especially unusual. From the outside looking in, for a non-native of the local area or someone that hasn’t spent time in and around campus, it feels unfathomable. It is hard for teams to find two players who set out to spend their entire careers together, like Lofton and Osunniyi, to want to build something at this level for this long a period of time, who go out into the country where they can lock in on basketball and school and basically nothing else. It is something close to impossible that you might retain those players, even as they excel, that they’d stay long enough for you to refine their games and added the pieces they need to succeed. It is just as rare, for that matter, to find a coach like Schmidt, who arrived in 2007 as a hard-charging, basketball-is-life former Skip Prosser assistant and who now finds himself with almost 15 years in the rearview mirror in Olean.
Schmidt, like his players, has long since discovered the basketball benefits of his adopted home. Save for the intensity of local fan interest in the basketball program — the Bonnies routinely fill their 5,000-seat stadium from a community barely three times that size (“You go around town and everyone knows who you are,” Ossuniyi says, greatly understating things) — there are no distractions. Work is easy. Bonds are tight. “We talk to transfers who come in from other schools, and they always talk about how they haven’t had a connection with their other players like this,” Lofton said. “We are all brothers, 1 through 14. It’s no cliques, no groups. That comes with being in a small area.” The environment is clarifying. Why are you here? What matters to you, really?
By this point, if you’re playing for the Bonnies, if you’ve chosen it, you already understand. Schmidt has selected for this ethos, infused it into all of his teams. None of them embody it better than his best.
(Top photo of Osun Osunniyi: Scott W. Grau / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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Post by 123Rob on Oct 30, 2021 11:57:34 GMT -5
Inverted BONA version of the FAB FIVE ... NOW Imagine if all 5 exercised their extra year "COVID" option. Never happen - but great food for thought. Highly doubtful but yes, fun to think about. Fun even if any of the five came back. Here is my worthless assessment from least likely to most likely to return. ADAWAY- He will already have had 5 years in college. At his height he would need to be a guard in the NBA. To do so he needs to improve his outside shot (seems like it already a focus) and ball handling. I think he nabs a nice deal in Europe and begins a long, lucrative career abroad. DOM- He too needs to work on his handle for any chance of pursuing NBA dreams. He likely heads overseas and becomes another Schmidt player to have a nice pro career. LOFTON- He and Osun grab the lion share of publicity and attention. Probably needs to improve his outside shot and overall offensive game to solidify a decent shot at the NBA. However, I think his command of running an offense and getting shots for teammates has already earned him that chance. Kyle almost certainly leaves and gets the opportunity in the NBA on a two-way G League/NBA contract with someone. OSUN-Height and shot blocking ability that cannot be taught. But can he show enough offensive game this season, can he show enough durability and increased strength to further whet the appetite of NBA clubs. It takes longer for big men. He most likely jumps-for a chance to develop on someone's bench or G League squad or gets a large offer in Europe. But there may be a sliver of a chance that scouts tell him another summer working on skills/body and another season under Schmidt's tutelage would offer him an even better opportunity at the NBA in 2023. HOLMES- Despite being a bit overshadowed maybe his well rounded, overall skills have caught the attention of the parade of scouts at recent practices. Already has decent size and handle to be an NBA guard. Does he get a chance? Does he sign a contract overseas? Or does he take another year to hone all his skills. Perhaps getting his the first chance as "the go to" man and main option in the offense could open more eyes. His post basketball goal seems to be in journalism/broadcasting. Where better than Bona's to get a Masters in that area? IMHO, Holmes is 50/50 shot, maybe better, to be a Bonnie in 2022-23. |
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Post by gregmitch70 on Oct 30, 2021 12:33:01 GMT -5
Inverted BONA version of the FAB FIVE ... NOW Imagine if all 5 exercised their extra year "COVID" option. Never happen - but great food for thought. Highly doubtful but yes, fun to think about. Fun even if any of the five came back. Here is my worthless assessment from least likely to most likely to return. ADAWAY- He will already have had 5 years in college. At his height he would need to be a guard in the NBA. To do so he needs to improve his outside shot (seems like it already a focus) and ball handling. I think he nabs a nice deal in Europe and begins a long, lucrative career abroad. DOM- He too needs to work on his handle for any chance of pursuing NBA dreams. He likely heads overseas and becomes another Schmidt player to have a nice pro career. LOFTON- He and Osun grab the lion share of publicity and attention. Probably needs to improve his outside shot and overall offensive game to solidify a decent shot at the NBA. However, I think his command of running an offense and getting shots for teammates has already earned him that chance. Kyle almost certainly leaves and gets the opportunity in the NBA on a two-way G League/NBA contract with someone. OSUN-Height and shot blocking ability that cannot be taught. But can he show enough offensive game this season, can he show enough durability and increased strength to further whet the appetite of NBA clubs. It takes longer for big men. He most likely jumps-for a chance to develop on someone's bench or G League squad or gets a large offer in Europe. But there may be a sliver of a chance that scouts tell him another summer working on skills/body and another season under Schmidt's tutelage would offer him an even better opportunity at the NBA in 2023. HOLMES- Despite being a bit overshadowed maybe his well rounded, overall skills have caught the attention of the parade of scouts at recent practices. Already has decent size and handle to be an NBA guard. Does he get a chance? Does he sign a contract overseas? Or does he take another year to hone all his skills. Perhaps getting his the first chance as "the go to" man and main option in the offense could open more eyes. His post basketball goal seems to be in journalism/broadcasting. Where better than Bona's to get a Masters in that area? IMHO, Holmes is 50/50 shot, maybe better, to be a Bonnie in 2022-23. Very good rundown here but should also mention (god forbid) chances for injuries (or Covid) deflating a player's season a bit--not a wipeout but enough to hurt numbers and overall assessment. Of course we hope that doesn't happen but (unlike last year) this will be a long, long season and rougher schedule. Perhaps one player will have an off-year due to missing time and will want or need a full year to (as you say) "be the man" the following season. We've already seen a few very good players in A10 or elsewhere surprisingly take that super-senior year... |
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