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Fourth-quarter surge lifts Cards over Salem
By ERIC FORTUNE
CANFIELD
Records can be deceiving and more often than not, a coach will not admit if his team might have overlooked a squad that — at least on paper — might not have been in the same league as them.
For most of Friday night, it looked like Canfield were going to fall into that trap as Salem was game for nearly three quarters before the Cardinals took over in the final period to escape with a 63-55 win.
“If you look at our record, you’d probably take us lightly,” Salem coach Rich Hart said. If you take five or six of those games away, we’re still missing one of our leading scorers (Mike Ciotti). We still played everyone tough. Our kids play with a lot of intensity. They may have taken us for granted a little bit.”
Still, the Quakers (7-15) did get another one of their leading scorers back in Max Wolfgang, as his presence was felt with Salem jumping out to a quick 12-3 advantage after a Ryan Hoover bucket.
D.J. Pullie led the Quakers with 18 points, Hoover added 13 and Wolfgang finished with 12.
“We just wanted to move the ball,” Hart said. “This is only the second game back for [Wolfgang]. He’s been out for six games. We’re trying to get back into the flow again of him playing again. So we wanted to move the ball; try to go inside out and we did a pretty good job of doing that in the first quarter.”
The effective play continued into the second quarter thanks in large part to timely shots from the Quakers to combat anything the Cardinals (18-4) could counter with.
“We had no energy whatsoever in the first quarter,” Canfield coach Todd Muckleroy said. “Salem’s playing well. I saw them a couple of times and they were playing really well. With one of their better players back in Max Wolfgang, they were going to be a formidable opponent.”
Leading 27-21 a the half, Muckleroy was able to make some adjustments on his end thanks in large part to some energy he received from his bench players in spurts in the first half to keep the Cardinals in striking distance.
“We saw some good things; not so much in the X’s and O’s, but we saw some things out of personnel,” Muckleroy said. “Bringing some guys maybe to start out the quarter that brought us some energy in the first half. We made those personnel changes and that got us really closer to the top of the hill where we can make a push.”
It wouldn’t fully take place until Mike Yourstowsky’s only field goal, a 3-pointer, at the 2:08 mark that finally erased the lead Salem had held for nearly the whole game.
That bucket started a 30-16 run with which Canfield closed the game.
Brady Clark was huge down the stretch scoring seven of his 11 points after the Quakers had cut it back to within five at 53-48 after a Mark Fredrickson bucket.
The Cardinals’ two other players in double figure were Andrew Midgley (19) and Mason Mangapora (17).
“I was pretty confident; frustrated, but confident at halftime that our pressure could get to them,” Muckleroy said. “We had to make sure they weren’t hitting their shots. They were in the first half. We were hoping that our pressure would get to them and take their legs a little bit and maybe we could get some shots for us to fall. That was really the key; we were able to get shots to fall.”