Not since 2010 had Elon University senior guard Josh Bonney had a night like Thursday.
But the off-the-court rapper got into his flow a bit. And that’s never a bad thing.
Bonney scored a season-best 15 points in 21 key minutes off the bench to help the Phoenix to a 73-59 victory over the Furman University Paladins in a Southern Conference matchup.
With sophomore guards Austin Hamilton, the starting point man, and Kevin Blake dressed like a college a capella duo on the bench in sweaters and khakis on a wintry night, a guy who had only played a total of 42 minutes this season stepped in and contributed when called upon.
Bonney’s 15 points were the first time he had scored in double-digits since Feb. 25, 2010, against Georgia Southern University. In fact, he scored, you guessed it, 15 points that night.
“It was just good to finally be back out there,” said Bonney, who added three rebounds and two steals. “Everything just flowed well tonight, and that was as far as the whole team was concerned. Everybody was just doing what they were coached to do and that’s what made it available for me to play well tonight. Lucas being down there in the lane, us rebounding well, everybody doing their part.”
The senior from Houston, Tx., led a charge that started with 12:07 left in the first half. A back-and-forth game broke open in the Phoenix’s favor when Bonney hit a jumper to give Elon a 20-15 lead. The shot sparked an 11-4 Elon run during which the 5-10 senior scored six points.
Elon took a 42-27 lead into halftime, displaying an aggressiveness that Elon head coach Matt Matheny was quite pleased with.
“I liked our energy, I liked our togetherness and I felt like we kept an aggression for 40 minutes, and that’s why we built a lead in the first half,” Matheny said.
In the second half, Elon built the lead to 25 points with 15:22 left in the period with a 9-0 run, capped by a three-pointer from freshman guard Tanner Samson, who scored nine points and committed just one turnover in a team-high 33 minutes while starting in Hamilton’s place.
“He does a lot of things really well,” Matheny said about Samson. “He’s got great poise about him, doesn’t feel like a first-year player.”
From then on, it was pretty much the Phoenix’s ball game. Furman senior guard Bobby Austin scored all of his game-high 19 points in the second half, including nailing a three-pointer at the final buzzer, after getting three fouls early in the first half, but the work Elon had done early sealed the Phoenix’s second-straight SoCon victory after defeating Western Carolina University 80-67 Monday night.
With the conference schedule in full swing, those SoCon wins are important, and this one was something Elon junior forward Lucas Troutman (team-high 18 points) called a “huge confidence booster."
“(It’s) something we can build off of and continue to carry on,” he said. “It can help motivate us to play better. The only thing we can’t do is fall back on it thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve won these two games, now we can slack off and just play.’ That’s something we cannot bring in these games. We’ll have to come out just like we did tonight and fire on all cylinders and just play.”
The Phoenix was the beneficiary of a season-high 26 bench points. Sophomore forward Ryan Winters scored all of his nine points in a strong first half, while senior walk-on guard John Moody even contributed a bucket late in the game.
Matheny said that was clutch considering Elon is three-fourths of the way through a stretch of four games in eight days.
“It’s going to take all of us,” he said. “You get in the grind of a conference schedule, we’re three-fourths of the way through four games in eight days. And so you’ve got to play a lot of guys. You’d love to think we could play five guys that are our best players and just stick with them, you could do that all four of these games, but it wears on you through the season. We want to play a lot of guys.”
Matheny said he knew he was going to play Bonney when he found out Hamilton, who missed the game with a knee injury that the head coach said he was very concerned about, was going to be out.
Bonney had notched four points and an assist in nine minutes against Western Carolina when Hamilton went down. Before that, he had only scored two points in his previous nine appearances this season.
“He gave us really good minutes on Monday night,” Matheny said. “We really didn’t talk to him much about how much he was going to play (tonight). We wanted him just to play, and that’s what he did and he played well.”
Troutman was quite impressed.
“I knew Josh was due for a game sometime,” he said. “He always impresses me. He’s probably one of my favorite point guards. As fast as he is, he has the ability to get in the lane, get inside and score at will. That’s something that’s great about him. He was able to do that a lot and it helped us out. He played a heck of a game tonight and I couldn’t be more proud of the way he played tonight.”
If the Phoenix is to contend in the SoCon the rest of the season, it just might need a little more flow from No. 0.