By: Josh Silverman
There wasn’t a dagger three that put the crowd on its feet or a block that will make highlight tapes that was Quinnipiac men’s basketball’s undoing. It just never sustained a run long enough to get ahead, ultimately leading to the Fairfield Stags beating the Bobcats 74-64 in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference semifinals.
It was a combination Sunday of Quinnipiac’s inefficient shooting from behind the arc and Fairfield’s star talent.
Though the Bobcats were able to contain the Stags from three-point range in the second half, it was Fairfield nailing seven treys in the first half that led spearheaded Quinnipiac’s demise, and it never dug itself out of that hole.
“I certainly wasn’t happy with the way the game started,” Quinnipiac head coach Baker Dunleavy said. “It was similar to Canisius, but we were able to come back (in that game). I don’t think it caught us off guard. They’re a good team and they played well at the beginning of the game.”
A lot of Fairfield’s success can be attributed to its senior guard and All-MAAC first team selection Tyler Nelson, who finished the game with 19 points after going perfect from the line and connecting on 5-of-12 shots from the field.
“He’s a good player,” Quinnipiac senior guard Cameron Young said. “He can shoot from anywhere on the court. He’s crafty and when he gets going, it’s kind of hard to stop him.”
One of the Bobcats that tried to will them to victory was Young. He finished the game with 24 points and continued to fight down the stretch. In the process he set Quinnipiac’s Division I single-season scoring record with 622 points.
Unfortunately for Young, one of his counterparts throughout the season didn’t quite match the senior’s productivity Sunday.
That teammate is freshman guard Rich Kelly. The freshman’s struggles were apparent throughout the game, as he shot 2-for-14 from the field in what is now the Bobcats final game of the season. Earlier in the season, Kelly dropped 40 points on Fairfield’s home floor.
“I saw aggressiveness,” Dunleavy said when talking about his point guard’s last two performances against Fairfield. “And you don’t get 40 without being aggressive. You’re going to have some games where if you’re going to have 40 at times you’re going to go 2-for-14.”
Aggressiveness might have been a factor, but some of the credit has to go to Sydney Johnson. In his seventh year as Fairfield’s head coach, Johnson learned from his prior game-planning mistakes against Kelly and this time developed the perfect plan to combat the freshman.
“I don’t think we respected his scoring ability as much,” Johnson said. “We wanted to respect him as a scorer and a distributor and I think that distinguished our gameplan from game two to game three.”
The man that had to execute the gameplan was Fairfield guard Jerome Segura. He followed his coach’s marching orders and to his credit shut down one of Quinnipiac’s best players.
“Coach just came up with a great defensive gameplan and I just went out there and followed it,” Segura said. “We changed the gameplan the third time around and it worked. He (Kelly) went 2-for-14. Kelly is a great player but I think our adjustment really got under him.
All week Dunleavy had stressed that whenever the season came to end, he wanted his team to finish it the right way. Sunday, he felt that his team can feel good about the fact that they accomplished that.
“It’s important to us that every time we step off the court that we can put something out there that we can be proud of and our community at Quinnipiac can be proud of,” Dunleavy said. “The basis for that is playing hard and playing together as a group and I have no doubt in my mind that we did that.”
