Q&A: BC coach Jim Christian discusses difficult season

For as rough as Jim Christian’s first season in the Atlantic Coast Conference was last year, he still managed to find a way to get the Boston College men’s basketball team to beat four teams in the conference.

More than a month into this season, though, the Eagles haven’t faced any of the teams they beat a year ago. As a matter of fact, they still have to get through a brutal two-week stretch before they start to see any opponents from the bottom of the league.

In the meantime, the Eagles are just trying to weather the storm. An 0-10 start to conference play has them in the middle of the second-longest losing streak in school history. They’ve been shorthanded since Jan. 26, when a nasty dunk turned into a nastier fall that left freshman guard Jerome Robinson with a fractured right wrist.

They’re coming off three road games against North Carolina, Virginia and Louisville, and their schedule isn’t at all compassionate over the next three games. It started Tuesday against North Carolina at Conte Forum.

Christian took time to talk about how the Eagles are navigating the turbulence.

Q: It’s a very basic question, but how are things holding up?

A: “I think we’re fine. Again, for me, I get to see the big picture of it. So I mean, trying to get guys better, trying to keep these guys playing. It’s tough for them because we’re obviously shorthanded. When we have tough stretches, we’re not a good offensive team right now. We don’t have anybody playing in a great groove and we need key guys to play.

“But I think their spirits are good, they’re competing, they practice hard and we haven’t had any issues. We’ve just got to keep getting more guys and get better.”

Q: I know it’s easier to say it in retrospect, but when you look at your schedule and you see the back end and you see the front end, are you like, ‘Man, this could get ugly?’

A: “Yeah, no doubt. I knew when it first came out and you’ve got nine new players and you play the stretch of games that we played, I don’t know if the best teams in the league, I don’t know how they would have fared with at North Carolina, at Virginia, at Louisville, home for North Carolina. That’s not easy. It’s just a matter of sticking together. We all knew it was going to be tough. At times we’ve played well, we haven’t played consistently enough. You have to play consistently really well and that’s the thing that’s tough for us.”

Q: Do you feel like your team could’ve afforded losing Jerome at the time you lost him?

A: “It was a tough time to lose him right? It’s never good to lose any one of your key guys, especially one of the three guys that has to play well for us to have a chance. So it’s never a good time and that was probably the worst play because it was a really good play. You can’t fault him. It was a great effort play. So it was just tough.

“But it’s more than that. A guy like Sammy [Barnes]-Thompkins has had a chance to step in and he’s played better and better. So it’s helped him. Other guys have had a chance to have their opportunities. So in some ways, it’s given them some things that they know now they need to work on. So out of every bad thing comes some good things.”

Q: I know as a coach, you’ve got to see it from 50,000 feet, right? You say, ‘Hey, we’re in a tough stretch, but guys get to have opportunities. But at the same time, as a coach you want to win games.

A: “No question. To be honest, I said this at Louisville: What I’m going through right now is the equivalent of football’s going across the middle. You take the hit, you try to get the first down, you take the hit, go back to the huddle and you keep plugging and you go over the middle again. I’m Julian Edelman right now. But I’m not going to be afraid to go over the middle. I’ll take all the hits and keep trying to get the team better.”

Q: The sad part is Julian Edelman somehow enjoys going over the middle.

A: “[Laughs] I don’t know if I enjoy it, but I’m willing to do it. So it’s fine.”

Q: As a coach, one you’re [mad] that you’re down 21-4 [to Louisville], but are you happy or encouraged that you see your team close that game to nine. Even if they did have a 19-7 run after that, they didn’t just lay down.

A: “It’s funny because even in that game with 10 minutes to go, it was a 9-point game with 10 minutes to go in Louisville. We’ve put our runs together, but we can’t sustain it because we struggle to score the ball. We really do. We struggle to consistently make shots. We turn it over. Our weaknesses are on the offensive end.

“Our defense, for the most part has been pretty good, because it’s hard to guard when you go through stretches like that where you just can’t score. In every single game, we’ve had unbelievable, good, solid stretches of defense, but we’re not rewarding ourselves at all. After a while, something’s got to give and unfortunately that’s been the problem for us.

We’ve had a tough time. We don’t have a lot of offensive playmaker guys and we’re not finishing very well. When we get our great opportunities —even great possessions — sometimes we don’t score. So it’s hard for us to find that rhythm right now. And that’s really the hard part.

“If you look at our team, the easiest ways to score are getting to the free throw line — we have a difficult time doing that, because we don’t have a lot of guys who are strong, great drivers. So we have a tough time getting to the free throw line. We shoot the least amount of free throws in the league by far. We’re a bad offensive rebounding team because we’re not very big right now. So it limits things. We have Eli [Carter] as a playmaker, Dennis [Clifford] can make some plays, so when those guys aren’t going well or they’re missing opportunities, it’s tough.”

Q: I had to look back to see when was the last time BC lost 10 straight games, and it was back when Al Skinner, it was his third year as head coach, he lost 12 games in a row in the Big East.

A: “Is that right?”

Q: These are the longest two losing streaks in school history. But the year after he lost 12, they started the year 18-2. As a coach, I’m sure you don’t get caught up in it as much as I would imagine, but how do you navigate this stretch and say this isn’t something that’s a permanent thing?

A: “I understand. I think what ends up happening is you have to understand where the program was. We lost nine guys. So it’s like being an expansion team. It really is. It takes time. It takes time to regroup, rebuild it, get the guys you need and get them comfortable in the roles they need to play. It’s not easy to go through it. Unfortunately, it’s not something created by anybody, it just happened and we have to make sure that we fight our way through it, not worry about it. Just keep getting better and that’s really all that we can do. Keep recruiting like crazy, Keep trying to add the right pieces, keep getting the pieces we have better. You never know how far away you are, you just gotta keep trying to get better.”

Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @julianbenbow.