St. Bonaventure Basketball: Analyzing the Bonnies’ recent hot streak

Just a month and a half ago, Mark Schmidt and St. Bonaventure Basketball were off to a 2-3 start in A10 play and fighting an uphill battle at 6-12 overall.

That same team is now 11-5 in conference (15-14 overall) and is looking like a more and more reasonable pick to win the conference tournament every day.

For those who don’t feel like doing the math, that means that the Bonnies have won nine of their last eleven games, and their only two losses over that span have come against other top-four contenders in VCU and Davidson. At the start of this recent hot streak, the team’s ranking on Kenpom.com was a mediocre 161. Since then, they’ve risen thirty-five spots up to 126, and there’s reason to believe they might continue to trend in the right direction.

I did some research to find out what could possibly have happened to allow this St. Bonaventure Basketball team, which was picked to finish 9th in the Atlantic 10 coaches’ poll, to get as hot as they have over their last eleven games. There was an abundance of information to sift through overall, and much of it was likely irrelevant, but three particular factors stood out as differences between the middle-of-the-pack Bonnies we once knew and the title-contender that they’ve recently become.