What went wrong in Quinnipiac’s second-half implosion at Siena

Quinnipiac looks for a path to basket as Bobcats squandered first-half lead Sunday at Siena. (Photo by Quinnipiac Athletics)

By Ethan Hurwitz (@HurwitzSports)

ALBANY, N.Y. — Quinnipiac head coach Tom Pecora walked out of his locker room for his postgame media availability and was blunt about his team’s second half performance. 

“We just got outworked,” Pecora said following the Bobcats’ 84-75 loss to Siena Sunday afternoon. “I think we were in a comfort zone at half, we thought they were gonna lay down because we handled them so well, and we played like an immature team in the second half, which is hard to believe with the number of veterans we have on the floor.”

It was truly a game of two halves for the Bobcats. The first one had junior forward Amarri Monroe having his way with the Saints’ defense. He had 18 points through the first 20 minutes and was looking like he would surpass a career-high set just two days ago. Instead, the second half saw Gerry McNamara’s squad rattle off a 25-6 run to upset the MAAC co-leaderBobcats. The nine-point win snapped Quinnipiac’s six-game winning streak and helped Siena pull closer into the thick of the conference standings.

Monroe was held to just 10 points in the second half, to which Pecora cited Siena’s defense as the main cause of his late-game struggles. His 28 total points did, in fact, set a personal best, but 10 of those came from the free throw line.

The full-court press, which started to come once the Saints chopped into the lead, stuffed the Bobcats right from the get-go. The effort level needed to just cross midcourt had to be ramped up, and the only ramping up came from Siena’s freshman guard, Gavin Doty. 

After being a question mark coming into the game—he drew a charge and hit his head hard against Marist on Friday—Doty had 19 points and added a game-high four steals in the winning effort. 

“You always prepare if he’s going to play, and Doty’s a tough (kid), he just beats you on effort,” Pecora said. “He just played harder than anybody we had on the floor today. And I told them before the game, he's the kind of guy that will embarrass you. He was outstanding. And I was surprised, quite honestly, to see him out there after I saw the fall he took Friday, but God bless him, you know? He’s tough as nails.”

So what went wrong? For the Bobcats, the 19 turnovers—the most since they had 18 in their January 12 come-from-behind win at Iona—put the offense behind the 8-ball more possessions than not. Bad three-point shooting limited Quinnipiac to an interior game, and graduate guard Savion Lewis struggled to facilitate an offense that had been clicking the better part of two months. 

“Today was a down day (for Lewis),” Pecora said. “He turned the ball over. He made some bad decisions for a veteran, and that can’t be the case.” 

With under three minutes to play, Quinnipiac broke out a press defense. But it was too late at that point, as the MVP Arena crowd had taken control of the game and the Bobcats’ offense still struggled to muster up anything more than a free throw opportunity. 

“(They) took away a lot of primary stuff,” Pecora said. “We missed eight layups. We missed eight free throws, I think. And if you turn the ball over that much, you’re not beating anybody if you do that.”

The 55 second-half points that the Bobcats allowed was more than the Saints had scored in the teams’ first matchup, and the most allowed by Quinnipiac since St. John’s scored 61 points in the second half on November 9. Now the out-of-conference game against a Big East contender was expected, but against a scuffling Siena team, it was surprising to see the Bobcats lay down like that.

“If we learn from this, we’re going to become a much better team,” Pecora said. “But you gotta look in the mirror and you gotta say, “all right, what did we not do?’”

Pecora made note that a step in the wrong direction in February is better than in the conference tournament.

“The tournament is a whole separate piece,” he said. “Right now is just about us being mature enough to understand what we didn’t do well, and then how we’re going to fix it and how we’re going to move forward with it.”