Impressive victory for Lakes
There’s an old adage in basketball that a team that presses doesn’t like to be pressed.
It’s kind of like getting a dose of your own medicine, and not liking it so much.
Lakes put that theory to the test Thursday night against Johnsburg at the Jacobs holiday tournament, and now fully endorses it.
The Eagles watched some earlier tournament games and saw Johnsburg pressing its way to offensive explosions that hit 80-plus points. But when Lakes turned the tables and hit Johnsburg with some pressure, Johnsburg seemed stymied, and Lakes wound up coasting to a 65-51 victory.
The win gives the Eagles, who improve to 4-7, a chance to play in the fifth-place game on Saturday.
“Our game plan was to get them out of their comfort zone,” said Lakes junior forward Ethan Sage, who scored a team-high 22 points. “We picked them up full (court) and started cutting them off and we were all over everybody. That slowed them down and gave us the opportunity to get steals.”
Lakes forced 14 Johnsburg turnovers in the first half alone in building a 37-17 halftime lead. When Johnsburg did manage to get a shot off, it was often off target. The Skyhawks, who drop to 1-11 on the season, missed on 19 of their 24 first-half shots.
“We just couldn’t hit shots, especially in the beginning,” said Johnsburg coach Mike Toussaint, whose team kept plugging away and actually outscored Lakes in the second half, 34-28. “We haven’t really had trouble (shooting the ball) this season. We hit 50 percent from 3-point range the other night and are hitting 40 percent on the year.
“We just couldn’t hit ‘em tonight. That’s it.”
Toussaint is anxious to make corrections at practice. The Skyhawks desperately need that time in the gym.
They started out the season 1-8 and Toussaint figured that a bold change was needed. Suddenly, Johnsburg became all about pressing and flying up and down the floor.
When the Skyhawks scored 87 points in a tournament game against Tilden, they seemed to be on the right track.
“We scouted them and saw what they were doing with pushing and pressing and we knew that we were really going to have to focus on our defense,” Lakes coach Chris Snyder said. “I think it was really about our guys scrapping on each possession. That made it hard for their guys to get good, clean looks and there were a lot of times it was one shot and a rebound for us. They weren’t able to set up their press on us very much.”
Instead, the Eagles often scored in transition. And sometimes, they did so with authority.
Michal Tomasiewicz had two big dunks on breaks en route to a 12-point night. He now has five dunks on the season. Tramone Hudson added 14 points for Lakes.
“Those (dunks) felt good,” Tomasiewicz said with a big smile. “The whole bench stood up. It brought our energy up. It was great.”
The Skyhawks showed a little bit of spunk after halftime, and cut the Lakes lead, which had ballooned to as many as 28 points in the third quarter, to 15 points in the fourth. But Sage, Hudson and Tomasiewicz helped Lakes pull away again with some late fourth quarter baskets and free throws.
“We just came out slow tonight,” said Johnsburg senior guard Steve Dixon, who finished with a game-high 24 points and was the only player on his team to finish in double-figures. “We like to push the ball and put a lot of pressure on defense and try to score a lot of points and shoot a lot of threes and tonight we didn’t execute our game plan well enough. It took us a while to get our shots to fall and we didn’t execute our press right and they got a lot of layups.”
Carmel 56, Rockford Jefferson 47: Carmel got 19 points from Chris Duff and 18 points from Jack George to get a win over Rockford Jefferson in the Jacobs holiday tournament.
The Corsairs fell behind 15-8 in the fourth quarter, but held Rockford Jefferson to just 5 second-quarter points to take control.