Gallery by Ashley Honaker
Lindside – The latest installation of the Greenbrier West-James Monroe rivalry was one of the best.
Struggling on offense all evening, the host Mavericks fended off their Greenbrier County foes Tuesday, claiming a 62-59 win in overtime in Lindside.
The win came despite a career night from Greenbrier West senior Brayden McClung who poured in 39 points for the Cavaliers, nearly leading them to an upset of the No. 2-ranked team in Class A.
Hitting on just 37 percent of their shots (22 of 59) with a particularly horrendous showing from behind the arc (3 of 22), the Mavs compensated by generating second chance opportunities. They won the rebounding battle 35-24 with 15 of those boards coming on the offensive end.
“We weren’t shooting well, and you can just tell it’s gonna be one of those nights,” James Monroe head coach Matt Sauvage said. “But the one thing you can do is you can create effort by hitting to the boards and that’s what they did. They bought into it and West played good tonight, especially Brayden. My gosh, I felt like he could have thrown it between his legs and it would’ve went in, you know what I mean? It was just one of those nights for him and you know, good for him. He’s a good kid. I’ve always liked that kid so good for him. But our shots just weren’t falling tonight and you’re gonna have nights like that, but what are you gonna do with it? And I felt like we battled hard. And I was glad to see us come out on top.”
The necessary overtime was indicative of how the game flowed as neither team leading by more than seven points with 10 lead changes and five ties in the second half alone.
The Mavericks threatened to pull away early, opening the second quarter with a 3 from Will Boggess to make it 16-9. But the Cavs, spurred by six points from McClung, ripped an 8-0 run to take the lead, holding the Mavericks scoreless for nearly four minutes. Ryan Cole ended the drought with a pair of layups but the Cavalier onslaught continued with a layup from Chris Davis and another jumper from McClung.
The lead eventually reached five points at 25-20 and sat at three points at the break.
Both teams went blow for blow, playing within a possession until late in the fourth. With 3:51 to play in regulation, Layton Dowdy nailed a 3 for the Mavericks to push their advantage to 51-46. It was one of only two shots the Mavericks made outside of the paint all evening.
A pair of free throws and a steal and layup helped West get the deficit back to a point with 2:28 to go. Those were the last points until West was forced to foul with 28 seconds left. Cooper Ridgeway nailed both of his free throws to extend the advantage to 53-50 and McClung, who drew a foul the other way, split a pair, forcing another foul. Fortunately for the Cavs, James Monroe’s shooting woes followed it to the line where it missed both ensuing free throws.
From there chaos ensued.
McClung nailed a layup on the other end with under four seconds to go to tie the game but immediately after inbounding the ball the Mavs were called for a travel, giving West the ball under its own goal with 2.5 seconds to play. The Cavs never got a chance to win it in regulation as they were called for an offensive foul on a screen, returning the favor.
“So many kids think they have to catch and shoot with 2.5 seconds left and you can take two good dribbles, which for a guard like Braden is a lot of space,” West head coach Jared Robertson said. “You know, we ran a little double screen for him and then we had a slip screen behind it and if they hadn’t called the offensive foul I think our slip screen was a layup to be honest. But you know, I think the walk was a tough call with two and a half seconds. It probably meant there’s gonna be a quick whistle and I wasn’t looking close. It may be that it wasn’t an offensive foul, but that’s tough on officials in that position. They don’t want to control the end of the game and you understand that.”
Given second life, the Mavericks didn’t waste it. Ridgeway opened the additional period by completing a three-point play and Mann netted a pair of free throws. The advantage was enough to fend off the Cavaliers who led just once after the start of the fourth quarter. The win came despite a shorter rotation and a reliance on Brady Baker, Dowdy and Ridgeway who played nearly all 36 minutes.
“The matchups we had, we knew we had to give Brady a lot of minutes tonight,” Sauvage said. “We didn’t know it was gonna be every minute. But we knew we were going to do that just with matchup. They’re a physical team and pretty big down low and we knew we had to give him a lot of minutes in there to fight with that. So I thought Brady played great tonight for that. You know, he missed a few two and three-footers, but you’re gonna have that especially when you’re a big guy playing that many minutes. There in overtime, I thought West played very aggressive and we were able to take advantage of a few of those aggressive defensive plays and get some backdoors at the basket. And when you jump out to a lead in overtime it kind of changes the timing of things and it was just in our favor.”
Overtime was one of the instances where the Mavs were able to exploit the Cavs’ defense which played against them at times.
“We kept trying to switch our defenses up,” Robertson said. ” We hadn’t seen anybody do that to them this year and hadn’t seen people really play a lot of zone or traps on them. A couple times I got us in a bad spot and that’s on me. But when you’re flying around in your zone, sometimes you get out of position and when you got a couple big kids like they’ve got with Baker and Ridgeway, who are both great rebounders, you give up some of those. It didn’t help that my big guys were in foul trouble so much that I didn’t have both of them in there to help offset that too. So just a lot of little things. We’re gonna play them one more time for sure. And you never know, with the way it’s been with us lately It might be two more. So hopefully we can find some things we can do a little bit better to rebound better because we’ve had a couple of games this year where we’ve done really well and we’ve had a couple games we struggled in and it’s really cost us.”
Ridgeway led James Monroe with 16 points while Baker netted 13.
Tanner Hagy joined McClung in double figures with 10 for the Cavs.
GW: 9 18 14 12 – 59
JM: 13 11 17 12 – 62
Greenbrier West
Tanner Hagy 10, Damian Dixon 3, Brayden McClung 39, Isaac Agee 6, Chris Davis 4
James Monroe
Will Boggess 5, Layton Dowdy 9, Cooper Ridgeway 16, Ryan Mann 4, Bannon Goodman 4, Ryan Cole 11, Brady Baker 13
