City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
--

For Ursinus to get back on track, they’ve got to keep having fun.

That’s what playing Penn at the Palestra on Saturday was--fun, even in a losing effort against a Division I team.

So the Bears brought that same mentality with them on Tuesday to a road matchup at Rosemont. Just go out there and have fun. And they certainly did, running away from the Ravens in a 92-68 non-league win.

“We always talk about playing like it’s summertime, playing like it’s pick-up,” sophomore forward Joe LoStracco said. “That’s what we did against Penn, and that’s what we did today.”

Ursinus was in control for the vast majority of the 40 minutes of play thanks to big outings by LoStracco (21 points, nine rebounds) and junior Matt Knowles.

Knowles, a 6-2 guard from Waverly (Pa.), matched his career high with 26 points just two days after setting that mark against Penn; overall, he shot 10-of-16 from the floor and made four of his eight attempts from beyond the arc.

The Scranton Prep product had a slow start to the season, spraining his ankle in the team’s opener against Stevens; though he only missed one game, it bothered him through the team’s following three before a two-week layoff between Johns Hopkins and Penn allowed him the rest he needed.

Before the Penn game, he was averaging 9.8 ppg; that's now up to 15.2 ppg.

“I’ve been talking to the coaches a lot over that week about things, I hadn’t really been playing to my potential before that,” he said. “Just having fun, focusing on being loose and having fun, that’s been the best part for me and it’s been a lot of fun the last two games.”

Ursinus coach Kevin Small certainly isn’t counting on Knowles to score 26 points every game from here on out, but his return to full strength is crucial for a Bears lineup that only goes about 7-8 deep on most nights.

“Ultimately, we’re not a particularly good team if he’s averaging 25, 30 points,” said Small, who’s in his 16th year on the UC sideline. “All of our four championship teams have had some point distribution amongst our starters...we’ve got six guys really close to being double-digit scorers, and that’s really the way we prefer.”

Knowles was on fire early, dropping all four of his triples in the first half to help the Bears to a 46-32 advantage at the break.

After Rosemont was able to cut that deficit down to seven points to begin the second half, Ursinus started finding the 6-7 LoStracco down low, often on dump-offs from senior reserve Matt Wonderling (8 pts/9 reb/6 ast) or sophomore guard Brian Rafferty (8 pts/5 ast).

The Archbishop Wood product scored on five consecutive possessions at one point, which ended with his team up 77-60 with and under six minutes to play, effectively putting the game out of reach.

“We knew that they were going to go into a run, that they’re a team capable of runs and it was all about just weathering a storm,” LoStracco said. “Once we figured that out, we got some stops and then just started getting it inside and then easy drives and stuff, it just all came together for us."

There wasn’t much the Ravens could do to slow down LoStracco or the rest of the Bears’ front court, who dominated their opponents to the tune of a 44-26 rebounding advantage.

Ursinus certainly doesn’t look like a team that entered play on Tuesday with a 1-5 record, not after staying within seven points of D-I Penn on Saturday before this one. Part of that comes from their having played an intense opening stretch: at Scranton, vs. undefeated Swarthmore, at nationally-ranked Franklin & Marshall, against perennial Centennial powerhouse Johns Hopkins.

And this is still a fairly young group, with just two seniors on the roster and three sophomores in the starting lineup along with Knowles and senior Malik Draper. So they know there's plenty of time left to turn things around, if they can keep having fun.

“We feel really good about ourselves,” Knowles said. “We’ve played a really tough schedule and we’re playing with the teams, we’re just not finishing games...while we’re 2-5, we’re a very confident group that we could have a good season; we could make a run at the playoffs, but we also haven’t done anything yet.”