Quinnipiac squanders chance to move into first place in MAAC

HAMDEN — A chance to stand alone atop the MAAC standings was tantalizingly there for the taking for Quinnipiac Tuesday night, like a wide-open 3-pointer.

But the long-range shooting that carried the Bobcats to as much as an eight-point lead over Iona betrayed them over the final 11 minutes of play, and the Gaels left the Peoples United Center with an 81-77 victory.

Instead of Quinnipiac creating a smidgeon of separation atop the league standings, the logjam only grew denser. The Bobcats (14-12 overall) are now tied with five other teams for second place in the MAAC at 9-6, a half-game behind idle Canisius.

“The standings are packed,” Bobcat coach Baker Dunleavy noted. “You can’t get distracted by that, but certainly every game you lose in this league is a missed opportunity. Down to the wire here, there’s not a lot of separation.”

Quinnipiac — like Dunleavy’s alma mater and former home as an assistant coach, Villanova — lives and dies by the 3-pointer. The Bobcats lived off it in the first half: their first six baskets (including 12 of their first 13 shots), eight of their first nine and nine of their first 11 were from beyond the arc.

It helped add up to a

39-36 advantage at the break after an entertaining half that featured 11 lead changes and four ties. Rich Kelly opened the latter half with a trey, and after a Cameron Young driving layup, Quinnipiac had its biggest lead, 44-36.

But the Bobcats shot just 8-for-26 from 3-point land in the latter half. They wound up hoisting up no less than 49 3-pointers for the night, hitting 17 of them.

“That’s a big number, 49 in a game,” Dunleavy admitted. “We’ll definitely watch the film, we’ll definitely see some that we took that probably should have been drives. But, that’s what allows us to be different, offensively, and unique. We can shoot it from different positions.”

The Bobcats entered the game ranked 10th nationally with 10.6 3-pointers made per game, and ranked 23rd in 3-point attempts with 721 — nearly 29 per game.

“We’re gonna be a team that shoots a lot of them,” Dunleavy added. “To balance that out, when we do drive, we’ve got to get good ones.”

Quinnipiac was also coming off a triple-overtime win over Siena two days earlier, so fatigue may have been an issue.

“I can see where that would be the case,” Dunleavy noted. “I do think we started out the game shooting the ball well. We had our legs, we were good. Maybe we wore down a little bit. But we talked about this is 40 minutes right in front of us, doesn’t matter what’s happened before. You get to play 40 minutes, leave it all out there, and we came a little short on that.”

Kelly wasn’t about to make any excuses, however.

“I don’t think physical fatigue played a roll in that,” the sophomore point guard from Shelton said. “I just think, defensively, we couldn’t get stops.”

Young, who made national headlines with 55 points in the win over Siena, led the Bobcats with 30 points (though just 3-for-8 foul shooting). Kelly was the only other Quinnipiac player in double figures, with 18.

Tajuan Agee led Iona (11-15) with 27 points, Rickey McGill added 21 and Hartford’s E.J. Crawford netted 20.

The Bobcats led by seven after a Travis Atson 3-pointer with 13:25 left. But Agee scored on a drive with 11 minutes left, igniting an 11-3 Gael run capped by a Crawford trey that put Iona ahead for good.

The Gaels opened their lead to 10. Young tried to keep the Bobcats in it, converting a pair of rare fourpoint plays during one 27second stretch late in the game.

Thanks to some shoddy late free-throw shooting by Iona (4-for-10 over the final minute), Quinnipiac had three chances to make it a one-point game over the final 29 seconds. Young missed a pull-up trey Jac, then Jacob Rigoni missed a wide-open wing 3-pointer with 20.6 left.

Kelly finally did the trick with a trey with 7.2 ticks remaining. But Agee hit one of two freebies with 5.7 left, and the game ended — somewhat fittingly — on a missed 3-pointer, by Atson.