Jacubec’s 37 points ignite Struthers win

February 22, 2012 at 12:06a.m.

LIBERTY

Senior guard Jake Jakubec closed out an outstanding regular season for the Struthers High boys basketball team with a 37-point, six-rebound, four-assist performance in Tuesday’s 76-62 victory over Liberty.

Jakubec scored 12 points in the first quarter on 5-for-6 shooting as the Wildcats ran out to a 24-12 lead. The Wildcats shot 9-for-12 as a team in the quarter, including 5-for-7 on 3-pointers.

“We look to set a lot of ball screens for Jake and he’s so good at getting to the rim that he’ll start scoring and scoring and scoring,” Struthers coach Joe Safko said. “Then guys will have to help and we can kick to our shooters for 3s.

“We’re a pretty good shooting team, we shoot 35 percent from the 3-point line.”

Liberty coach Dan Bubon had praise for Jacubec.

“Jake just controls everything. He is so smooth,” Bubon said. “We let him get to the hoop too much, we gave him some clean looks at 3s and we didn’t make him take enough pull-up jumpers.

“But he is good, he is really good.”

Dylan Schmidt added 13 points and eight rebounds for Struthers (16-4).

Liberty’s top senior Jalen Mann was impressive himself with 23 points and nine rebounds. Jamaal Daniel added 13 points and Darrien Underwood had 10 to go with seven rebounds.

“For the most part we had control, but late in the game they started to go hectic on us, just running guys all over the place trying to trap us,” Safko said. “We tried to get into something where we could pass the ball around and they did a nice job.

“They got traps, they got tips off passes, they made us miss some shots and they got fast breaks off it,” Savko said.

The Wildcats’ largest lead was 33-16 midway through the second period. Struthers led 41-26 at halftime and 55-41 after three periods. The lead was 62-46 two minutes into the final quarter.

Liberty (10-10) got to within 68-60 at the 1:45 mark, but could get no closer.

“It seems every time we were about to get it to a six-point or a four-point game, we’d do something,” Bubon said. “We would miss a foul shot, we’d fumble the ball, the one time one of their kids shot a 3 that I don’t think they wanted him to shoot and he nailed it. We couldn’t catch a break.

“Struthers played better than we did,” Bubon said. “That’s going to happen sometimes. Jake played a really good game, the other kids knocked down shots. The game is totally different if some of those shots rim out.”