Bobcats conquer their recent close-game demons at just the right time

Much of the Quinnipiac men’s basketball team’s regular season was surrounded by heartbreak, bewildered by the oh-so-close. Bobcats fans saw their young and inexperienced group fight to the wire of a game decided by two points or less 10 different times this season. Some resulted in exhilarating victories. Others ended in deflating defeat.

The Bobcats had a golden opportunity to open November’s Paradise Jam with a win over heavily favored Colorado before missed free throws turned into a buzzer-beating three-pointer for the Buffaloes. With a chance to claim a huge road win against reigning conference champion Iona back in February, the Bobcats squandered an overtime lead and fell in the second overtime period. It would be the first of three overtime losses for the Bobcats in the final month of the regular season, as hopes of a MAAC Tournament bye painfully slipped their grasp.

Even as the Bobcats stand victorious and shockingly advance to the conference semifinals, the aftershocks of their recent struggles in close games still reverberate through the locker room.

“Some of those losses at the end of the year are still fresh,” head coach Baker Dunleavy confessed after the Bobcats’ improbable 72-69 win over MAAC co-regular season champion Canisius on Friday night.

Suddenly, those gut-wrenching defeats now feel like a distant memory. After a month of disappointment, the Bobcats removed the bitter taste from their mouths by claiming the program’s most thrilling victory in recent memory, shocking the second-seeded Golden Griffs by holding a narrow lead through the final minutes of the second half.

Turns out, the Bobcats just needed the calendar to turn to March.

If you ask Dunleavy, Friday night’s win wasn’t about the team righting a month of wrongs. His Bobcats had been steadily improving and preparing themselves for such a moment since November, even if it didn’t show in the win column.

“As we were losing those games…I was starting to realize that we were becoming a good team,” Dunleavy said. “But that’s hard to tell people on the outside when you’re losing seven of eight. It sounds so cliché. But as a coaching staff, we felt like we were getting better. We needed to find a way to make our team understand that you can get better when things don’t go your way. And they bought into it.”

Rich Kelly, one of Dunleavy’s poised freshman, has been playing at his best over the team’s two tournament wins. Kelly has been called upon to log more minutes than anyone else on the team, including crunch-time minutes. It hasn’t always produced encouraging results. Kelly’s late turnovers in the Bobcats’ double-overtime loss to Fairfield served as a major blow to the Bobcats’ tournament seeding hopes. After Kelly’s driving layup in the closing seconds of Friday night’s win sealed the biggest win in five years, nobody cares about the Bobcats’ seed anymore. Especially not Kelly, who didn’t care about past miscues in crucial moments. He still wanted the ball.

“Whatever (coach) calls I run,” Kelly said of his late-game heroics to send the Bobcats to the semifinals. “But I was hoping he called it for me. He did, and it worked out well.”

As for those crippling losses in the regular season? They might have also worked out well. When the Bobcats faced their most pressure-packed moments of the season, they didn’t blink. Why would they? It was a situation they had been in over a dozen times already. They may not have all resulted in wins, but they all feel like wins now. The experience they earned has proven invaluable at the most important time of the season. Only Dunleavy and company truly comprehend the fruits of their painful labor.

“It’s helped us,” Dunleavy said of the team’s past losses. “Even for me as a coach. We didn’t do everything perfect (on Friday night), but I didn’t sense any type of panic. I think we’re comfortable in those situations. I don’t think there was a lot of discomfort tonight. I really think we’re at our best right now.”