Riviera falls short of first state title
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end for Riviera Prep and this fouryear run of unprecedented excellence.
For four years, Riviera Prep has contended for state championships, making the Class 4A semifinals in 2019 and the Region 4-3A championship in 2020 before losing an entire season to COVID-19 in 2021. Now the Bulldogs were finally in the title game for the first time, with a chance to get the Class 3A championship to overtime Friday if they could just get a good look at a three-pointer out of a timeout with 4.5 seconds remaining.
Instead, Riviera didn’t even put up a three. Nicolas Flowers got a lastsecond layup and put it through the hoop as time expired. Tallahassee Florida State University won 67-66 to deny the Bulldogs their first state title.
“Obviously, a heartbreaking and devastating loss for my boys,” Riviera Prep coach Anthony Shahbaz said. “This one’s way tougher than the first time.”
When the runner-up trophy was handed out, Riviera’s players and coaches didn’t even move from their bench at the RP Funding Center. They were still in shock about how it ended, especially after all they went through to bring the Bulldogs (24-8) to the brink of history.
They fell behind 14-6 in the first quarter and battled back with a 7-2 run to end the period and get it back to 16-13. They went down 21-13 early in the second and again answered with a 7-2 run, and went into halftime tied 28-28 when guard Esteban Lluberes banked in a three from the right corner at the buzzer.
In the fourth quarter, they faced their largest deficit at 51-38 and, right when Florida State University (24-7) was ready to pull away, they turned on the press and used an 11-0 run to cut the Seminoles’ lead to 53-52 with 5:45 left. The rest of the game was played within six points and mostly within three.
It was as close as Riviera got, though, even as Lluberes poured in 28 points in his final game as a Bulldog.
Shahbaz tried to set up the senior to be the hero. With 4.5 seconds left, the fifth-year coach called a timeout with Riviera down 67-64 and drew up a play for Lluberes, who tried to cut from the baseline up to the three-point line, only to run into a pair of defenders with Florida State University switching to a zone defense. The Bulldogs instead inbounded to Edward Nnamoko on the right wing and he immediately fired up a two-point jumper, leaving it short. Flowers grabbed the rebound and threw up a putback as time expired.
“A few of our guys I wouldn’t say panicked, but just tried to get a shot up,” Shahbaz said. “We had a secondary play for one of our shooters, but it never got to that point.
“Obviously, we came up one point short on that broken play.”
In the middle of every one of those comebacks — and every accomplishment from the past four years — was Lluberes, and he gave the Bulldogs a belief they could rally, even when Florida State University was on the verge of blowing them away at the start of the fourth in Lakeland.
In the fourth quarter, Lluberes scored nine points, went 4 of 4 at the free-throw line and dished out two assists while the Bulldogs tried to scrape out one last comeback. In the end, they fell one point short.