BURNABY — Soloist and conductor.
The wheel of attrition has ground down especially hard on the Simon Fraser men’s basketball team over the first month of its 2024-25 season.
And as its ranks have thinned at the guard spots, the Red Leafs’ urgency to get performance from one of its youngest players has grown exponentially over the past few weeks.
So when a fourth member of that group was felled by illness this past week, a pure sophomore from East Vancouver was asked to not only be a scorer, but his team’s go-to playmaker as well.
The results?
In a double-overtime game on Saturday that ended just in time for dinner, it felt like Red Leafs fans at the West Gym had been treated to appetizer, dinner, drinks and dessert… all courtesy of Irish Coquia.
In his role as soloist, just like he did in high school in leading the St. Pat’s Celtics to multiple provincial titles, the 6-foot-1 Coquia played like a force of nature in dropping an SFU career-high 34 points in the Red Leafs’ 99-94 win over Salt Lake City’s Westminster Griffins.
And in his new role of on-court conductor, he dished 10 assists against just three turnovers in playing a marathon 47:43 of the 50-minute game
“It feels amazing,” Coquia said after logging what basically amounted to an entire NBA regulation game’s worth of floor time.
“Last year, obviously I was behind both David (Penney) and Elliot (Dimaculangan), so I just hard to work hard knowing that it was going to be more of my turn this year,” he prefaced of the team’s former starting backcourt.
Penney has graduated, Dimaculangan is taking a senior redshirt season, while Eric Beckett and Jimmy Zaborniak are both battling injuries.
Add to that the fact that newcomer Lenz Dupont came down with an illness this week.
Throw all of that in the mix and you get that rarest of opportunity: The chance to define yourself as a special player.
And when Coquia capped off his 10-assist night by sending a laser-beam 75-foot pass on a rope from behind his own baseline to a speeding Tate Christiansen for a game-sealing dunk with 7.3 seconds remaining, all questions had been answered.
“I had to fill some shoes,” Coquia continued, as the Red Leafs (3-5) got their first win of the season against U.S. competition after showing their mettle in parts of five others. “Last year, at the end of the year (head) coach (Steve Hanson) talked to me and said ‘You will have a big role next season.’ You are going to have to contribute. Not just as a shooting guard but also conduct offence. Get everyone else going. In high school, it was just me. This season, the first two months have been hard, calling plays and making sure everybody was in the right spots. It’s paid off. It feels great.”
Afterwards, Hanson tipped his hat to the efficiency that Coquia, Tuesday named the GNAC’s men’s Player of the Week, brought to his dual role in the backcourt.
“He’s just getting better every week,” the head coach said. “I think he’s had some rough turnover games earlier in the season, but today he had some good ball security. More assists than turnovers (10-to-3), and that is what we need from him because he’s going to have the ball in his hands a lot this year.”
Saturday’s win was one of the most entertaining games Simon Fraser has played in the past number of seasons.
No, it wasn’t a GNAC conference clash.
The first one of those doesn’t happen until Dec. 5 & 7 when SFU plays, respectively, at Central Washington and Northwest Nazarene.
Meanwhile, SFU begins a two-game road swing through California tonight when it faces Westmont in Santa Barbara.
The Red Leafs next home games will be their GNAC home opener against Alaska-Anchorage (Jan. 2) and Alaska (Fairbanks) (Jan. 4).
But going to double-overtime to get its third win of the season against a Griffins team which two nights earlier stunned Western Washington 66-63 in Bellingham with a buzzer-beating three-point bucket, is a prime indicator that the Red Leafs are a team that will go as far as their ability to summon consistency takes them.
And on Saturday, SFU got great performances up and down the lineup.
Sophomore guard Tate Christiansen stole a sideline frontcourt inbounds pass by Westminster’s Parker Christensen, and immediately fed Coquia for a lay-up that put SFU ahead 70-68 with 19.1 seconds remaining in regulation.
The Griffins’ Chase Potter, however, a former teammate of Steveston-London post sensation Fardaws Aimaq at Div. 1 Utah Valley State, knocked down a baseline jumper with eight seconds left to send the game to overtime knotted at 70.
The Red Leafs made astounding plays in the first overtime.
After a Potter trey gave the visitors an 82-78 lead with 20 seconds left, Coquia saved a ball from going out of bounds under the Griffins’ hoop by staying inbounds on the baseline, then reaching to both save and pass the ball in one motion to teammate Tobe Ezeokafor, who proceeded to bank home, off high glass, his sixth triple of the game (6-of-11) to pull SFU to 82-81 with 9.6 seconds left.
Potter, finished with a team-high 30, hit two free throws with 7.4 seconds left to make it 84-81 Westminster.
But then with what was the most incredible play of the game, SFU newcomer Luke Howard drained a buzzer-beating three-pointer from the top of the arc to tie the game 84-84 and send it to a second OT frame.
Coquia, who hit three triples of his own Saturday, drew an immediate double-team on the perimetre, and his deft pass to the left found the 6-foot-9 Howard, who has been a story unto himself this season.
Howard, an Abbotsford native coming back home after a number of seasons stateside, unfurled the calmest of rainbow threes, the ball leaving his hands with 1.1 seconds on the game clock, and falling just ahead of the horn.
Simon Fraser got even stronger in the second overtime.
In the final 25 seconds, Coquia’s feed to Van Bylandt for a layup, a Van Bylandt made free throw, and finally, Coquia’s coast-to-coast pass for the Christiansen dunk kept the home team on top.
Howard finished wth 22 points and eight rebounds, Ezeokafor with 20 points, Van Bylandt with 17 points. The team’s only other points were Christiansen’s six.
Coquia said afterwards that his team’s focus on late-game situtational pieces was huge in the win.
“It was ‘OK, down three with 10 seconds left’ and all of that,” he said. “Our practices are harder than our games. We prepared and it came to light.”
And just for good measure, the game’s star went back to his roots for a little help from a former Simon Fraser guard.
“I went to St. Pat’s and I told coach John that I was struggling with my shot,” Coquia said in the Saturday post-game of John Boateng, the former SFU guard from just past the turn of the century who coached Coquia to a B.C. junior title with the Celtics a number of seasons back. “I told him ‘Let’s get working’ and we put in a lot of time with my pull-up. Now, I am excited to tell him that I played a great game.”
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