Wheeling tops Daniels-less Vernon Hills
It was just a dream.
At first.
Wheeling basketball coach John Clancy woke up on Monday morning with a smile on his face. He had dreamed that he and his team got some good news just in time for the start of the holiday tournament that their school has been hosting for the last 33 years.
In Clancy's dream, Vernon Hills, the team that his Wildcats would open with later in the evening, was playing without its best player: DaVaris Daniels, a 20-point scorer and a major Division I athlete who has committed to play football at Notre Dame.
“I think I dreamed that he was sitting out because he was hurt,” Clancy said of Daniels. “It was kind of wild that I dreamed that.”
Wild because Clancy's dream practically came true.
Daniels didn't sit out Vernon Hills' game against Wheeling on Monday night in the first round of the Wildcat Hardwood Classic because of an injury. But he did miss every single minute of it.
The weather is what did in Daniels.
The 6-foot-3 senior forward had visited his father Phillip, a defensive end for the Washington Redskins, for Christmas and got stuck in the D.C. area after a massive snowstorm dumped as much as 20 inches of snow over the region and all but shut down the entire East Coast.
Hundreds of flights over the last couple of days, from New York to Washington, have been cancelled, including the flight that was to bring Daniels back to Chicago with plenty of time to spare before the tournament.
With Daniels out of the picture, the Wildcats pounced.
They threw a nasty pressure defense at Vernon Hills, took an early lead and didn't let up en route to a 49-44 victory.
The win is Wheeling's first in a first-round game at the Hardwood Classic since 1995, the last time the Wildcats won their own tournament.
Wheeling, which was anxious to get back on the court after its 49-point loss to Prospect prior to Christmas, improves to 4-5.
Meanwhile, Vernon Hills, which is hoping that Daniels will make his scheduled 6 a.m. flight Tuesday morning and be available for its 2 p.m. Hardwood Classic game against Carmel, suffers its first defeat of the season. The Cougars are now 10-1.
“We scouted (Vernon Hills) earlier in the year and saw that they don't handle pressure all that well,” said Wheeling guard Ricky Schwind, who led all scorers with 16 points, including 4 three-pointers. He was the only Wildcat to score in double-figures. “And that's kind of our trademark with the pressure defense. We try to get in people's faces and make them fold under the pressure.”
Wheeling forced Vernon Hills into 18 turnovers and went up by as many 13 points in the second quarter.
But it wasn't just pressure from the Wildcats that Vernon Hills had to deal with. The pressure of playing without Daniels weighed heavily.
And if that weren't enough, the Cougars were down another starter for the first half. Point guard Darren Hoveydai had his own travel issues while flying back from a trip to Arizona to see his brother. He didn't enter the game until the third quarter.
“When you lose your best all-around player and another starter, it's a big miss,” said Vernon Hills guard Chris Argianas, who led three Cougars in double-figures with 15 points, all of which came on three-pointers. “But I texted (Daniels) after the game. He told me that he'd be back for sure for (Tuesday's) game. He was like, ‘Let's do this.' The consolation championship is now our goal.”
The Cougars were close to keeping the tournament championship — their original goal — within reach.
Stephen Curry (11 points) hit a halftime buzzer beater from beyond halfcourt that gave the Cougars some momentum. They were down 29-26 at the break, but had clawed back from a 29-16 second-quarter deficit.
Vernon Hills got a big third quarter out of center Brian Berzanski (12 points overall, 6 in the third quarter) and took its first lead since going up 1-0 in the opening moments of the game when Argianas drained a 3-pointer with 6:45 left in the fourth quarter.
“We came back and I was real proud of our kids without DaVaris, and without Darren in the first half,” Vernon Hills coach Matt McCarty said. “We showed some guts there to cut it to 3 at halftime and it was a ballgame the whole second half and we had some chances down the stretch.”
The teams jockeyed for position for the rest of the fourth quarter and Argianas hit another 3-pointer with 14.4 seconds left to pull the Cougars to within a bucket at 46-44.
But Wheeling took good care of the ball in the waning seconds and Tyler Shapiro and Charlie Kirk hit some big free throws to ice the game.
“I was real proud of our kids because we continued to battle,” Clancy said. “We showed a little resiliency. We got stops when we needed to and a couple of big rebounds down the stretch. We continued to compete and believe in what we were doing.”