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Sports
Mustangs' pressure too much for Wolves : Sports : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisMustangs' pressure too much for Wolves
| Oswego East boys basketball look to rebound after 0-4 start
| by Laura M. Medina
| 11/29/2012
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It hasn't been the most ideal start to the 2012-13 slate for the Oswego East boys' basketball team, but the Wolves are hoping to learn from their time at the Hoops for Healing Tournament and move forward.
Perhaps the first thing the Wolves will do is forget about their final game in the bracket - a 73-52 loss to Metea Valley in the fifth-place matchup last Friday afternoon at Oswego.
Having dropped the first three games at the tournament, Oswego East was hoping for a bit of redemption while facing the similarly struggling Mustangs.
But a slow start put the Wolves at a disadvantage, as they trailed 6-0 to start the game. Soon, however, they were back in the game, bouncing back by scoring eight straight points. Senior guard Tyler Ross accounted for four of those.
"I think we realized that we were going to play four very good basketball teams regardless of where the cards fell at the end of the day with this tournament," Oswego East head coach Ron Murphy said. "If you want to be good, you've got to play great competition, and obviously, we had the opportunity to do that here."
Oswego East continued to hang in there throughout the remainder of the first quarter and eventually took a 26-20 lead with 2:39 left in the second. But Metea Valley was persistent, surging ahead with a 14-2 run that made it a 34-28 Mustangs lead to end the first half.
Trayvond Taylor had five points, and Sean Davis (10 points) had four for Metea Valley, while junior guard Jeremy Mitchell's jumper with 12 seconds remaining accounted for the Wolves' only offense in that span.
"We played 14 good minutes of basketball, and then, we allowed their pressure to take us out of anything that we wanted to do; I think that kind of was the tale of the rest of the game," Murphy said. "To their credit, they're very good, they've got great guards that defend well at that position, and they gave us fits."
The Wolves pushed back in the third quarter, getting within three (36-33) following senior forward Kendall Dorsey's jumper and follow-up free throw to close the run. Dorsey had a team-best 11 points in the game.
A series of fouls, though, soon negated that stretch. Oswego East was whistled seven times to Metea Valley's two in a four-minute span, and in the process, the opposition amassed a 51-34 lead. Taylor and Bryson Oliver had four points apiece for the Mustangs.
"We just couldn't find a way to get that momentum back, and a lot of that relates to their pressure," Murphy said. "It's one of those things we've gotta do moving forward is make sure that we can handle the pressure, because people are going to bring it."
Senior forward Nick Craft (seven points) had a jumper with 1:33 left in the third to break the Wolves out of their scoring slump, but his efforts were only helped by junior guard Mike McAllister's pair of free throws with 30 seconds left, leaving their team trailing 58-38 heading into the fourth.
From there, it was all Mustangs, who led by as many as 27 points before securing their 73-52 victory. McAllister hit a three-pointer at the buzzer, but little solace was found for the Wolves, whose 0-4 start is daunting but not impossible to overcome.
"We've got to learn to play at a high level more consistently," Murphy said. "There were times in each respective game where we executed well, we did a better job on the boards or we defended better, but we can't put it together, and I think that's a product of some of lack of experience.
"That's not an excuse anymore. We've got four games under our belts, and we're going to have to find a way to correct some the mistakes that we're making, and that's going to happen in practice. We've just gotta get back to put our nose in the grindstone."
Though the outcome was not in the Wolves' favor, the day's highlights were promising, as sophomore center Houston McCullum contributed 10 off the bench to go along with his three rebounds.
Perennial top scorer and senior guard CJ Vaughan was quiet in the game, finishing with just six points, but he earned a Player of the Game nod for the tournament, along with Metea Valley's Taylor, who had a team-best 14 points and six steals on the day.
Vaughan and the young crop of budding stars on the Wolves hope to contribute in a greater fashion as the regular-season schedule starts today, Thursday, against Plainfield East in the first of four straight against Southwest Prairie Conference foes.
"We've got to learn together, play together and get to the point where who can do what," Murphy said. "We're really trying to find out who can do what. We've got a lot of moving parts right now, and we've kind of gotta define who's going to play what role, figure out who our best five are and try to put them on the court for an opportunity to win games. I think that there were times where we played well, but unfortunately, not well enough to win, and we've got to play better.
"We've got a progress, we've got to move forward, we've got to get better, and we're not where we want to be right now, but there's only one way to remedy that, and that's for each of these guys and everyone who's part of the program to be accountable and to figure out a way for us to get better."
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