McDonald survives shaky start against Western Reserve

February 6, 2016 at 12:06a.m.

By ERIC FORTUNE

BERLIN CENTER

Coming off a 76-point victory just three days ago and playing a team they beat by 44 back in January, more of the same wouldn’t have been a surprise to many in attendance Friday night, but just wasn’t in the cards for McDonald.

After a rough opening couple of minutes where Western Reserve jumped out to a quick 13-3 advantage, McDonald overcame the initial hit to pull out an 81-65 victory in Inter-Tri County, Blue Tier play.

“Second time around, at their place, this isn’t a big surprise,” McDonald coach Jeff Rasile said. “We told the kids yesterday this was going to be a war. They jumped out to a 10-point advantage, so when you consider that, we were able to outscore them by close to thirty points after the fact.

“We were calm through that. We knew they could hit some shots. We didn’t play [Lance] DeZee as well as we should. We told them to let him shoot, but we only let him shoot four in a row. This a tough place to play and we’ll take the victory.”

DeZee’s early barrage of buckets gave Western Reserve (7-12, 2-7) the early lead and allowed them to hold serve after one as both teams were deadlocked at 22 after one.

McDonald’s defense stiffened holding DeZee to one field after 11 points in the opening quarter.

“We hit some shots early and the mentality was to go at them,” Western Reserve Patsy Daltorio said. “I thought we did and I thought we did a nice job moving the basketball down the floor, making extra passes and we knocked down shots. When you put that in the equation, with them missing a couple, it was good for us.”

After making just 8 of 20 in the opening quarter, McDonald’s defense helped its offense get going in limiting Western Reserve to four field goals in the second quarter. McDonald took advantage of a six-minute scoring drought by Western Reserve to pull ahead by 17, 41-24, after a Jake Reckard 3-pointer.

Reckard made three 3-pointers and shared the team scoring lead with had Dylan Portolese. Both finished with 20 points. Zack Fedyski added 10 points and Matt Howard had 10 rebounds.

But each time it seemed McDonald (18-2, 8-1) was poised to break the game open, Western Reserve knocked down a barrage of shots to stay within striking distance. A 7-0 run to end the first half made it a 10-point game at the break.

“Every time we seemed to get a 17- or 18-point lead, they hit a couple of 3s or made a couple of runners,” Rasile said. “We missed some defensive rebounds and loose balls that could have took it to 20 or so. Those are critical. We can’t beat Lisbon on Tuesday night by not going 100-percent and grabbing the ball.”

McDonald shot well enough and caused enough headaches to finally build a 21-point lead and held off an opportunistic Western Reserve squad in the second half.

“We wanted to rebound,” Daltorio said. “Obviously, they press the whole game. That’s the writing on the wall. You know what’s coming. I thought we did a nice job of handling it. Early on, we didn’t rebound as well as we wanted to. A couple of shots didn’t fall. They hit some and the rest is history.”

Ryan Demsky led Western Reserve with 20 points and DeZee and Kade Hilles each finished with 14. Jack Cappabianca had eight points and 14 rebounds.