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Harding handles Howland’s pace
Tigers take air out of the basketball,
but Raiders still control game throughout
By ERIC FORTUNE
HOWLAND
Six weeks ago, Warren Harding’s boys basketball team dismantled Howland, 108-34, on the Raiders’ home floor.
The Tigers slowed the pace in Friday’s rematch, but not enough to avoid another loss to Harding.
Gabe Simpson scored 22 points, Shakem Johnson added 19 and 11 Raiders scored in an 83-46 victory on the Tigers’ floor this time.
Simpson was deadly from outside the arc with five 3-pointers and Johnson played well inside as they set the tone early to give Harding (14-1) a 27-10 lead after one quarter.
“I may be biased, but he [Johnson] is one of my favorite players I’ve ever coached,” Harding coach Andy Vlajkovich said. “He came in as a sophomore and guarded players he shouldn’t have even been guarding. A lot of people see the dunks, but he’s our best talkers on defense.
“He has a very high IQ and he’s a great teammate. When you put that together with 6-7 and athletic, I’d rather be coaching him than not coaching him. He’s a great kid. To be honest, his best basketball is down the line.”
Getting big games from Johnson and Simpson was important because Harding big man Derek Culver did not play.
Howland (6-8) slowed the pace and it worked well limiting the Raiders to just 36 points in the second and third quarters while they hung tough scoring 23 against the Harding defense.
The only problem was that they dug themselves that 17-point deficit after the first quarter and could never overcome it.
“If you look at the game plans of each team, you knew that theirs was definitely to run — no doubt in my mind,” Howland coach Jason Lee said. “More importantly than the game plan, if you look at the strengths of both teams, the strength of their team is the athleticism. The strength of my team is our brains.
“We’ve always tried to outsmart teams. Today, I really felt like my kids went out there in the first quarter and they were afraid. The game just got away. In the third quarter, we ran our game plan and the score was 4-4 five-and-a-half minutes into it. It’s hard to get a teenager to see the bigger picture. I have a lot of really bright kids that picked up a lot of things tonight. This is another one of those stepping stones.”
The Raiders shot 31 of 50 from the floor and despite the Tigers’ pace, they continued to do enough things well to maintain control of the game despite being taken out of what they like to do.
“They slowed the game down a ton,” Vlajkovich said. “They ran bubble posts for a long period of time. That was a good adjustment by them, but we hoped our pressure would eventually wear them down. They got us on some of that stuff. A couple of their baskets were out of good execution. It was definitely a different strategy on their part.”
The Raiders came into the matchup ranked ninth in the latest Associated Press Division I state poll. Vlajkovich feels that his team can get even better.
“I think the thing that most people have to realize is this team is like three years in the making,” he said. “Three of these guys started and the other two played a lot of JV minutes. These three starters were 13-10 as sophomores and 20-6 as juniors. This isn’t some magic potion that we took before the season. It’s an experienced group that took its lumps in the Lake Erie League.”