MEDICAL LAKE — It’s been said it’s the sweaty, tired men in the arena that count.
And you’d have experienced that first-hand if you had been in the Medical Lake gym on Thursday night, Dec. 12, to watch the Cardinal boys basketball team’s amazing 15-point comeback thriller that ended with Ashton Hamilton-Becker’s clutch 3-pointer in the final seconds of the game that notched the 58-56 Cardinal win.
The win, according to head coach Jordan Starr, was in part due to a team double-scouting effort of the Dec. 10 Northeast 2B North Dragons (4-2) 65-57 win over the 3-2 Northeast A Freeman Scotties.
“Our big strategy was to take away their best player,” Starr said of the Dragon’s 6-foot-5-inch guard Nick Watkins.
That job fell to 6-foot-3-inch Jordan Petersen.
“We put Ashton on their point guard to make it difficult on him,” Starr said.
Calling him a gritty, tough competitor, Starr has been using Hamilton-Becker as the team’s disruptor, pit-bulling him against opponent’s power players to free up Cardinal shooters like Petersen and Nick Mason to rack up points.
And Hamilton-Becker was disruptive Thursday, coming onto the court aggressively from the get-go.
But the point game favored the Dragons for most of the first three quarters enough that, with 5:33 left in the third, they held a 15-point, 41-26 advantage.
But the Cardinals were light years from being defeated, and they begin to methodically pepper away at the gap. By the start of the final period they had narrowed the score to within 10-points.
Starr noted that one lesson the team learned from the Liberty game the week before was that full-court defensive pressure seemed to amp-up the Cardinal offense.
“A lot of times our best offense is our defensive pressure,” Starr said. “We were able to do that again in the fourth quarter.”
And the quarter pretty much belonged to the Cardinals, who held St. George’s to just eight points while burning up their own net with 21.
By the game’s final two minutes the Cards had narrowed the scoring gap to within two points, then briefly took a 55-54 lead at the 1:30 mark before the Dragons hit a 2-pointer with less than a minute to play.
Then, with seconds on the clock, Hamilton-Becker nailed a 3-pointer from the left corner to lift the Cardinals over the Dragons for their third win of the season.
“When it went to Ashton, I just knew he was going to knock it down,” Starr said. “He wants to win more than anybody on the court.”
While the game plan didn’t quite work out as originally planned, Starr noted that it didn’t faze his team, who kept at it and never gave up.
There were some odd points in the very physical game, however. At some point Petersen got blood on the back of his jersey that was noticed by the referee, who halted the game for a wardrobe change. But then the same ref called a technical foul when Petersen took his jersey off to switch over to another — uniform changes must be done in the locker room, according to league rules.
Entrapment, perhaps, but in the end it mattered not.
Mason, as the games designated shooter, led the team with 18 points, followed closely by Petersen with 17 and Hamilton-Becker with 10.
Detailed statistics were not available by press time.
Medical Lake sits at 3-1 as they head into NEA league play against sixth-place Lakeside (3-3) on Tuesday. The team will then be on the road for the next seven games.
Their next home game is Friday night, Jan. 17, when they face Freeman.
Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].
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