Before their recent 3-game win streak and the continuous discourse about the merits of playing only 5 players in a basketball game, St. Bonaventure’s disappointing campaign this season was partially fueled by the Bonnies 3-point defense. Before their last 3 games, Bona opponents made an above average 35.23% from three and took 46.20% of their field goal attempts from the perimeter, one of the highest ratio’s among all D1 teams. In the three-game win streak since though, St. Bonaventure opponents only hit 30.74% of their threes.
Allowing opponents to take more threes than most is nothing new for the Bonnies, as they allowed 43.1% of opponents total field goal attempts from 3-point range last season but those opponents only hit 30.7% of those shots. There has been plenty of analysis from the likes of Ken Pomeroy and Seth Partnow discussing how there’s an element of luck in defensive 3-point %. Given the Bonnies have allowed plenty of threes the past two seasons, has regression caught up to Bona’s three-point defense? With tired legs not helping things, St. Bonaventure’s defensive shooting luck may have turned after last season.
Looking at the numbers from the Bonnies most recent 3 game win streak, on the aggregate the Bonnies allowed a three-point attempt rate of 43.64% in these wins. So, did they just get some defensive three-point shooting luck turning back in their favor? Perhaps not. In the first win against Fordham, the Rams are a 30.3% three point shooting average team on the season yet took 53.33% of their shots from the perimeter against St. Bonaventure (it is worth noting that Bona had a 17.9% block rate that game, so I’d start chucking up threes if I had Osun Osunniyi and company sending my shot into the fourth row). A team could always get on the right side of variance and get hot from three so it’s not ideal to allow that many threes but if you’re going to allow it, Fordham isn’t the worst team to do it against.
After getting the win allowing a poor shooting Fordham team to chuck it from deep, the Bonnies did a much better job running the Saint Louis Billikens off the line in their recent home and home. SLU take a lower percentage of their field goal attempts from three-point range than most A10 teams on average, but against the Bonnies they took 36.84% and 39.58% of their shots from the perimeter which are slightly below and above the national average respectively. These games also are a great example of the variance we can see in three-point shooting, with the Billikens hitting 28.6% of threes in game one and 47.4% in game two. These results book-end SLU’s three-point percentage for the season nicely, where they are averaging 35.5%.
At the time of writing, the Bonnies have a match up tonight with UMass. As Chazz Michael Michaels might say, the Minutemen do one thing and one thing only, shoot threes. UMass shoot 38.7% from three-point range, which is 7th in the entire country and take 44.3% of their shots from the perimeter. Now, it could be inconsequential since it is defense optional in Amherst this season, but how well the Bonnies run the perimeter shooting Minutemen off the line could be a bellwether for the rest of the season. Will we see the Bonnies Ironman five and expanded bench (Karim Coulibaly and Quadry Adams got 18 and 10 minutes in the two SLU wins respectively, wow!) continue to not allow opponents to get as many threes attempts as they had earlier in the season? The answer could determine if we see the St. Bonaventure team we expected in the preseason or the one we saw in many of the games thus far.
A10 Stats 
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