Bentonville leans on Lee late
SPRINGDALE — For more than 30 minutes, Jaylin Lee’s scoreline was a blank slate Friday night.
He filled it up when his team needed it the most.
Lee scored six points in the closing 1:35 to help the Bentonville Tigers remain perfect in the 6A-West Conference with a 53-46 win against Springdale Har-Ber at Wildcat Arena.
“He was a little frustrated with the way he shot the ball early in the game,” Bentonville Coach Dick Rippee said. “He showed pretty good maturity with the way he came back and finished. There’s a lot of kids who wouldn’t be able to do that. I thought the way he finished was really good.”
Bentonville (14-1, 8-0 6A-West) took Har-Ber’s best shot. The Wildcats (13-5, 5-3) rallied from a five-point halftime deficit to tie the game at 34-34 on a three-point play by Elijah Woodard with under a minute left in the third quarter. They took the lead on a double-pump layup by Jermaine Tilford, who scored 10 points in the third quarter while showing off a mid-range game and slashing drives to the bucket.
The Tigers fought back with a 9-2 run in the fourth quarter to retake the lead 4542 on a breakaway layup from Hayden Shanks and a post layup from freshman Caden Miller.
Har-Ber had a chance to get back into the game, but the Wildcats missed five consecutive free throws. They were 5 of 14 from the free-throw line for the game.
“I thought things were going our way, but we couldn’t score inside,” Har-Ber Coach Tommy Deffebaugh said. “We missed a lot of free throws. When we went up four, I thought we were going to grab the momentum, but our free-throw shooting let us down.
“At that point I thought we had it, but we let it slip away from us.”
Har-Ber pulled within 4744, but Lee sliced through the lane and hit a layup off a jump-stop before adding a late free throw to keep the Tigers perfect.
“Major credit to Har-Ber,” Rippee said. “They played a great game. Our guys just made plays. We had a hard time rebounding it, but man they were playing so dadgum hard and our guys were competing hard, too. Just a great high school game.”
Shanks led the way for Bentonville with 14 points, and Harrison Hicks added 10 points, all in the first half. Tilford had 14 points for HarBer, and Mack Wright added 10.