Missed chances haunt Red Devils in tourney loss

HASKELL — Already with two wins over larger schools (White Hall and Jessieville) this season, Mountain Pine met its match with Class 4A Bauxite Thursday night.

Trailing 44-42 with less than four minutes to play, the Miners reeled off nine straight points and thwarted Mountain Pine’s late comeback bid to win 55-48 in the second round of the Bill Gibbs Memorial tournament at Haskell Harmony Grove’s Daniel Henley Fieldhouse.

“I see this tonight as something we can learn from,” Mountain Pine coach LaMont Page said following his team’s first loss of the season. “Bauxite is a very disciplined team; at this point in the season, we’re not. We’ve been winning our games on talent alone. Early in the season, I’m glad this happened. It shows us what we need to work on.”

Seven straight points by Tyler Zander gave the Red Devils a 42-40 lead with 4:39 remaining in the fourth quarter before Bauxite started to pull away. A three-point play by Graham Chenault put the exclamation point on a 9-0 run that gave the Miners a 51-44 lead with less than two minutes to play.

Fay Haywood pulled Mountain Pine within 48-53 in the final minute before Bauxite’s Jacob Stroud knocked down two free throws to set the final margin.

“We have to learn how to finish games,” said Page. “Regardless of whether we’re tired or whatever it is, we can’t let a team that good pull away from us in the end. Maybe it’s conditioning; it’s early in the season and we’re a week and a half out of football. It’s going to be up to me to work the substitution pattern so they can be fresher at the end of the game.”

Haywood and Matt Snow opened the game with consecutive 3-pointers for the Red Devils, setting the stage for a back and forth first half.

Haywood and Chenault each scored seven points in the first quarter with the Miners clinging to a slim 14-12 lead. Held to two points in the first, Zander made his prescence felt in the second.

The senior big man scored six points in the second quarter, but Stroud buried two shots from behind the arc as Bauxite maintained a 23-22 advantage at the half.

With Mountain Pine trailing 31-27, Snow connected on his second 3-pointer of the game to trim the gap midway through the third quarter.

Two more treys by Stroud gave the Miners a 38-33 lead before a late basket by Matthew Herron pulled the Red Devils within 35-38 entering the final frame.

Mountain Pine squandered scoring opportunities early in the fourth, missing five of its first six free throw attempts. The Red Devils converted on

12 of 21 free throws in the game, compared to 12 of 22 by the Miners.

“You can’t miss 10 free throws and have 12 or 13 turnovers and beat a good team,” Page said.

A 3-pointer and successful threepoint play by Zander gave Mountain Pine its first lead of the second half before Kylon Clark’s layup sparked the 9-0 run by the Miners to put the game away.

Stroud paced the Miners with 19 points, including four shots from behind the arc, while Chenault finished with 18 points and Cooper Wright had

10.

Playing just his second game of the year after recovering from an injury, Zander finished with 16 points, and Haywood led all scorers with 20 points for the Red Devils.

“I think we can be a very deep team,” said Page. “We still don’t have our rotations down yet, but come January, we’ll be rolling. Once I get the substitution pattern down and we get in a little better condition, I think we can be really deep. We just have to learn to play together, learn to be more disciplined and just do the little things.”

Mountain Pine (4-1) opened conference play Friday night at Poyen and will face Carlisle in the third-place game of the Bill Gibbs Memorial at 3 p.m. today.

“It’s good to have this turnaround and be able to get right back out there after a loss,” Page said. “We can sit back and look at what ifs or what could have been, but we just have to come back out and play our game.”