Recap: Boston College Men’s Basketball Wins a Nailbiter Over Virginia Tech, 68-63

On Saturday afternoon, Boston College men’s basketball hosted the Virginia Tech Hokies at 12pm for an ACC match-up between two struggling squads. The Eagles entered this game having lost 6 of their last 7, while the Hokies had lost 4 of their last 7. Boston College, after a slow start, came roaring back to win 68-63.

The game started out immediately as a slugfest. Boston College set the defensive tone early by getting some blocked shots and steals, but their offense was simply inept and didn’t make a shot from the field until over 6 minutes into the game. Those offensive woes got BC into a hole early. Despite the Eagles defense playing a pretty respectable game, they saw Virginia Tech take a lead as large as 11 in the first half. But the Eagles started to find a bit of a groove finally towards the end of the half, making a run of contested lay-ups from Karnik and jumpers from Ashton-Langford and lessening the Virginia Tech lead to just 33-31 at half.

James Karnik continued his inside dominance to start the second half, immediately scoring the first 3 BC buckets and giving Boston College their first lead of the game. Karnik further dominated by hitting a 3 in the face of the defense and, with some help from Makai Ashton-Langford getting hot too, Boston College’s offense was suddenly on fire and shooting well over 50% from the field. The BC defense did start to fall apart a bit against 3-pointers as their offense started to heat up, so both teams were essentially in a shootout approaching the game’s final stretch. After a very close back-and-forth to close out the contest, Boston College’s Jaeden Zackery and TJ Bickerstaff hit some clutch shots and the Eagles emerged victorious.

James Karnik was the story of this game, scoring a career high 26 points and just utterly dominating Virginia Tech in the paint. Makai Ashton-Langford had himself a game too, and the Boston College offense looked about as good as its looked all season.