LANGLEY — On a blustery, wind-whipped Saturday, power outages across the region threatened the cancellation of the eagerly-anticipated battle between the No. 1 Seaquam Seahawks and the No. 2 Brookswood Bobcats in the final of the Tsumura Basketball Invitational’s Super 16 championship final at the Langley Events Centre.
Yet by the time the sun had set and the final buzzer had sounded, the doom and gloom were gone, replaced instead by the realization that the best new rivalry in B.C. girls high school basketball had been born.
Despite the fact that its start time had been delayed by over two hours, Saturday’s featured Super 16 championship game lacked nothing when it came to equal measures of mental fortitude, high drama and crazy comebacks.
And when the dust had settled, and the Seahawks had hung on to claim a 69-65 victory, surviving the Bobcats’ furious second-half rally to tie the score at 63-63 after it had trailed by 20 points (34-14) earlier in the half, a message had been sent that a preview of the B.C. senior girls Quad-A 50th anniversary championship game may very well have unfolded over the second weekend in December.
And afterwards, as the game’s key figures spoke, it was clear that tacitly or not, the overall intent behind so much of their narrative centred around the big picture of the provincial tournament.
The script in a nutshell?
The first key point is that Seaquam is capable of bringing a focus to the floor that is an absolute notch or two better than anyone else in the province, and when they do, you see the kinds of things that make you wonder who might be up to the task of playing a full 40 minutes against them.
Like the way they started on Saturday, not only holding a dynamic Brookswood team and its scoring sensation Jordyn Nohr to just 14 points as a team over the first half, but to two points over the entire second quarter.
Seaquam, which led 31-14 at the break, did just that.
Nohr had 10 points in the first quarter, and none in the second quarter where a regulation bucket from forward Ashley Vande Ven bucket was the team’s only offence.
Meanwhile Seaquam, got 11 points in the opening quarter on rim-attacking drives from forward Camryn Tait, and 11 more in the second quarter from guard Mackenzie Henderson, three of which came from outside the arc for a player who is now broadening her skill set as a senior with a floor game that leading to her own attacking drives, buckets and free throw opportunities.
“On a deep team everyone has their role, and my role has always been to shoot,” Henderson said after being named the Super 16 championship final Player of the Game. “This year I am excited to expand my role… add on some things.”
All of it made you wonder if the Bobcats, in their biggest game of the season were ready to go down without a fight, which conveniently brings us to our second key point.
Every team has their own individual limit of how deep a hole it can dig for itself before a rally is no longer in the cards.
Brookswood’s just might be deeper than anyone else”s in the province.
“I thought we were really locked in but I also felt they missed a lot of shots in the second quarter at the same level of difficulty that they hit later on in the game,” commented Seaquam head coach Lucky Toor, his comments foreshadowing the direction the game would later take.
Nohr, of course, was set to play a central role in all of that.
“It’s hard in those moments,” she said of her team’s first half “You could feel everybody’s energy go down, and we go into the locker room and we kind of get yelled at a bit, but we come out and we have a good mentality. It’s only a couple of points, a couple of layups and we’re back into it so we just have to get our energy up.”
Truer words could not be spoken.
After scoring 10 in the first half, Nohr exploded for 40 points in the second half.
Her 22-point fourth quarter points deserved whatever the basketball equivalent of a perfect NFL quarterback rating of 158.3 is, and on the heels of that was named the TBI Super 16 tournament MVP.
With her team down by 10 points (46-36) to start the final quarter, she reeled in the Seahawks by knotting the game with a deep, deep three-pointer which tied the score 63-63 with 1:01 remaining.
But the best part from a ‘Cats perspective was that she didn’t do it all via air mail. She also did it off the bounce, projecting herself physically, via the dribble, straight into the front windshield of the Seaquam defence.
It yielded a lot of twos, and nine second-half free throw attempts where she went 8-of-9.
“I was like ‘Let’s go,’” Nohr later explained of the fact that she wanted to set a tone for what the entire team needed to do in the second half.
“Once they started to see the ball go in the hoop, everything flows betters. So just a quick attack and draw some fouls.”
In whatever manner Nohr elected to play the role of fire starter, none of her second-half exploits caught Seahawks’ coach Toor off guard.
“One-hundred percent, I wasn’t surprised about that at all,” he said. “I told the girls at half time that it’s coming. Expect the storm. It’s about how do we recover and react to it. It came in a big way, but in the end, (basketball) is a game of runs.”
And although the only fly in the ointment as it concerned Nohr’s holy second-half scoring exploits was the game clock.
Seaquam won the game because it found enough ways to offset Nohr’s hoops when a few timely ones of their own.
After Nohr tied the game at 63-63 in the final minute, the Seahawks got a Henderson triple and a Tait free throw to take a 67-63 lead with 18.4 seconds remaining.
Nohr then threaded a perfect pass into the deep paint which Vande Ven turned into an and-one opportunity after being fouled on a contested reverse lay-in.
The free throw was missed, however, and Seaquam’s Kyra Toor grabbed the biggest rebound of the game, drawing a foul and hitting two free throws with 14.8 seconds left to ultimately make the victory complete.
“We are a great-coached team, a bunch of girls who have played in big games before and the experience is what helped us get through that by staying composed,” said Seaquam’s Tait who scored 19 points despite being hampered by picking up her fourth foul with 1:31 left in the third quarter while guarding Nohr.
“We didn’t panic, we just had to get some stops and that is what kept us in it. And sometimes, just getting that one rebound can change a game for you,” she said of Syra Toor’s late heroics. “We were able to come down the floor and kill some clock.”
In hindsight, Brookswood head coach Chrissy Nohr knew her team would answer back with a vengeance in the second half, yet from Brookswood’s perspective it was clear that it was like playing with fire when the opposition happens to be the undefeated, No. -1 ranked, defending TBI and B.C. Quad-A champs.
“They don’t care what the score is and it almost makes them want to fight a bit more,” coach Nohr said of a trait in her Brookswood team that is impossible to miss. “We had an unfortunate second quarter, and if we played like we did in the second half it would have been a different game. How we played in the second half is how we have to play to win championships We can’t have a first half like that, so we have to figure out how to get that energy in the first half.”
And while Brookswood players are just a short drive from the LEC, Seaquam players sat both in the parking lot and in the stands for over three hours Saturday , wondering if they were even going to play.
Waiting for lights that may not have come in time to even play was less than ideal, but coach Toor is a man always seeing the glass half full, and afterwards, he found a way to make it sound like a blessing.
“It was a long day and it was something out of everybody’s hands,” he said. “But I also think it was a good mental test and preparation for all the players. Last year we played in the provincial final and I think we started maybe 90 minutes late, so at the end of the day you have to find a way to stay mentally prepared. Even on a big day like that day you have to stay in the moment. So today was a good early test for that.”
And so now, all that’s left is waiting for the rematch.
“Oh, I can’t wait,” Jordyn Nohr said. “I think the next time is probably provincials so I honestly I think this is good for us. Lots of times we have gone to provincials finals having lost to the team that we have to play and it just motivates us. It literally does. I told everybody after the game ‘Well, this is good. We’re going to go into the provincial finals and we’re going to want to win it even more.’ So I can’t wait.”
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Great work as always, Howard. I hope you and your family are well.