WINCHESTER — As far as halftime adjustments go, the Millbrook High School boys’ basketball team excelled on Friday.
Leading James Wood by single digits heading into the locker room, the Pioneers came out of halftime with a cinderblock on the gas pedal to ultimately defeat the Colonels 68-52 in Donald H. Shirley Gymnasium.
Entering halftime up 31-26, it was a 21-4 run to open the third quarter for Millbrook that blew the doors open, as the Pioneers held a commanding 52-30 lead with just under two minutes left in the period. From that point forward, Millbrook (12-7, 5-1 Class 4 Northwestern District) was in cruise control en route to its third straight victory.
Millbrook ended up forcing six turnovers and outscoring the Colonels (10-9, 2-5) 28-9 in the third quarter, as six Pioneers found the bottom of the net in the period.
Millbrook coach Erick Green Sr. thought his team executed far better coming out of the locker room than the show it put on display in the second quarter.
“We do a good job at halftime making adjustments, and we talk as a team [about] what needs to be done, what we see and the changes that need to be made; that’s the key,” Green said. “We made some changes. The kids bought into it, and they got their energy back up. They wanted to win. I told them at halftime that [if] you lose this game, you’ll probably get knocked out the playoffs. So I think that was where the intensity rose, and we were able to pick it up a little bit and take charge of the game.”
Rylee Baker, who finished with 16 points for Millbrook, said the team wanted to reaffirm control of the cross-county rivalry game after allowing the Colonels to storm back from a first-quarter 15-2 deficit.
“We were really locked in and ready to go out in the second half and just compete,” Baker said.
Kyle Arthur scored 10 of his game-high 19 points in the third quarter. He helped set the tone for the Pioneers with a floater with 5:27 left in the third quarter. Shortly after Arthur’s shot, Daniel Clater sunk a layup to force a James Wood timeout amid a 9-0 run for the Pioneers.
Arthur thought the Pioneers’ performance in the second half was a better representation of how well they can compete.
“I feel like we weren’t really playing our game, and we really stepped it up the second half,” Arthur said.
Millbrook held a 15-2 lead in the first quarter after forcing turnovers on five of the Colonels’ first six possessions. The Colonels began to rally at the end of the period and entered the second quarter down 22-11.
Wood got within one point in the second quarter after Ashby Copenhaver caught fire and scored eight points in a four-minute span. Wood’s Alex Evans then delivered a layup to make it a 22-21 game midway through the second to bring his team within one. Arthur weathered the storm for the Pioneers by drilling a 3-pointer with 3:53 left to give his team a 25-21 lead. That four-point deficit wound up being the closest the Colonels got for the rest of the night.
Although Evans sunk two free throws early in the third, it took over five minutes of action for the Colonels to make a field goal after halftime.
James Wood coach Ben Bates said the third-quarter start was too much for his team to overcome. It was a similar story to the meeting between Wood and Millbrook in January, when Millbrook went on a 12-0 run to begin the second half to pull away in a 78-66 win for the Pioneers.
“Anytime that you dig yourself a [21-4] run out of the gate, it doesn’t really matter who we’re playing, especially a good team like Millbrook, where you have to exert so much energy to get back into it,” Bates said.
“The kids fought, and I just told them, possession by possession, especially in the second quarter, to try to get back into it. I could see it at halftime a little bit [that] we were exhausted. If you look at the two games, I mean, it was the same thing at their place. They just kind of ran us out of the game in the third quarter.”
Shawn Rooks added eight points for the Pioneers.
Evans led the Colonels with 11 points. Zach Woskobunik and Copenhaver notched 10 points. Millbrook held Brodie Sirbaugh — Wood’s leading scorer — to just four points.
From the opening tip, James Wood struggled to beat the Pioneers’ full-court press.
Bates thought the Pioneers’ defensive pressure behind the half-court line was problematic for his team. Not having one of the team’s starting guards, Ethan Tran, who was out with a lower-body injury, didn’t help matters.
“We’re going to see a lot of a lot of pressure, so if we can’t handle it, if we can’t attack the sideline to get the ball up the floor, these are going to be the results,” Bates said.
To Bates’ point, those are exactly the results that Green wanted to see his defensive game plan produce during Wood’s Senior Night.
“That was the goal,” Green said. “We were going to come out and play with intensity. We knew it [was their] Senior Night here, and we knew they were going to come out hungry, so we needed to match their intensity, which we did. We got them to throw the ball all around the court, [which] caused some turnovers, [and] we got some easy baskets.”
Millbrook will travel to Handley next Friday. Wood will host the Judges on Monday.
— Contact Justin Robertson at jrobertson@winchesterstar.com
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