LEWISBURG, Pa. – Stephen Tyree said he was numb. He remembered being on the opposite end a few years earlier, and now this was different.
“My freshman year, we lost to Holy Cross on the road in the championship, and I could never get that taste out of my mouth, until right now,” said the Bucknell senior guard.
In the middle of the last decade, Bucknell was one of the teams that ruled the Patriot League, along with Holy Cross. Those were the two schools you could expect to contend every year, and they waged some epic battles that included championship games, and Bucknell won twice. They won a game in the NCAA Tournament each of those years and was a No. 9 seed in 2006 after some good wins outside the Patriot League.
Those were halcyon days for the program, and probably seemed like many years ago to fans of the program after Dave Paulsen’s first year at the helm. But the Bison are going back to the NCAA Tournament as the clear top team in the Patriot League after Friday’s 72-57 win in the championship game over Lafayette.
It’s been a long road back to the NCAA Tournament, but Tyree probably knows it better than anyone and not just because of the loss in the title game his freshman year. As a sophomore, he was the league’s top defensive player and appeared to be well on his way to a career full of all-league honors while leading the Bison to more wins and possibly more NCAA Tournament appearances. But before his junior year, he tore an ACL and had to miss the season. He wasn’t the same player last year, and suffered another ACL injury this year but opted not to have surgery. While he didn’t play a big role on the surface, he’s certainly a reason this program has produced another champion.
The road back all started after Paulsen succeeded Pat Flannery, who had retired. Paulsen’s first season wasn’t one for the books on the bottom line, aided by the injury to Tyree, but the recruiting efforts that year landed an impact group that is now the core of this team going forward. In his first season, they also established how they would play, which was an adjustment for the holdovers, but Paulsen said they all bought in despite the struggles to a 7-23 mark. That helped lead to this year’s success, and now the Bison are well-positioned to stay on top of the Patriot League for a while.
The sophomores have already made their mark, and will continue to do that. Center Mike Muscala was the league Player of the Year and the Most Outstanding Player of the tournament. Bryson Johnson is much-improved not only with his shooting, but in many other facets of the game, much as Paulsen admits that he gets a little nervous when Johnson puts the ball on the floor. Joe Willman hasn’t had the same accolades this season but is no less a contributor, especially at the defensive end.
They made their mark on Friday, as did freshman Cameron Ayers with a nice reserve effort (12 points, six rebounds). But one needs to look back to the last remnants of the Flannery era for perhaps the three biggest reasons this team is headed back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in five years.
The Bison have one of the most underrated floor leaders in Darryl Shazier. There’s only one number you need to know with Shazier, an intelligent player who has a consistent, calm demeanor on the floor no matter what the situation: his 3.78 assist-to-turnover ratio. He simply knows not only how to find teammates, but also how not to give the ball away, a trait that is under-appreciated. After handing out three assists with no turnovers on Friday, the senior has 185 assists with just 49 turnovers.
A key wing has been G.W. Boon, who can be a character when he’s not playing solid basketball. He’s also an excellent biomedical engineering student who spent last summer doing research with the Geisenger Medical Center, where he worked on the design of a special pacifier used to extract DNA from babies. The well-built wing hasn’t had eye-popping numbers in his career, but Friday’s contributions are fairly typical: eight points, five rebounds in 21 minutes. What’s also interesting is Boon’s connection to the program’s prior success.
“I was a Kansas fan when they beat Kansas, so I was cheering against them,” said Boon with a smile. “I was really upset about that win, but when (Bucknell) came knocking on my the door next summer to try and recruit me, I automatically knew who they were, and I knew it was a team and a program that was about winning. That’s what I signed up for, and now to have that come to fruition at the end of my senior year, it’s amazing.”
And then there’s Tyree, who Boon raved about back when he missed the 2008-09 season because of the torn ACL. With him, it’s all about the intangibles.
“We have four core values on the left side of our board in the locker room: passion, talk, focus and toughness,” said Shazier. “Coach says no one embodies those values more than Stephen. The best way that we could pick him up as a team was to embrace those even more.”
The seniors have also seen the younger players handle success well. They haven’t acted like they have arrived and don’t need to work anymore, and the improvement is clear. Junior Bryan Cohen, who can easily be forgotten between the senior leaders and the super sophomores, is one of the most underrated players around and the best defensive player in the conference. He’s also seen them continue to improve while his role has changed.
While Muscala improved to the point of winning the league’s Player of the Year honors, perhaps no one has improved as much as Johnson. A talented shooter, he was up and down as a freshman, but his potential was clear. He’s shooting better, largely because of better shot selection, but he’s better using the dribble to either get a good shot or create something else, and he’s clearly better defensively. He consistently helped cut off passing lanes on Friday to slow the Lafayette offense. And he probably typifies the improvement of the young players who weren’t satisfied of being a trio of teammates to make the league’s all-rookie team last season.
“I used to do shooting drills with Bryson last year. We’d be neck-and-neck, I usually would win,” Boon said with a straight face, with laughter then erupting among his teammates. “I would win a lot of them, but this year, the kid is killing me in every shooting drill that we do. That just shows the way he’s worked in the off-season, and it shows in the games.”
Paulsen, who won a national title as a Division III head coach, said he’s never had a group that’s practiced like this one or been as coachable. He’s happy to see this effort rewarded for his players and the fans. And soon, Stephen Tyree won’t be numb anymore. He’ll be feeling quite happy now that he and his team are going to the NCAA Tournament in his last go-round.
