Erratic Braves beat unstable Horsemen
If both coaches are right in saying their respective teams are the living embodiment of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, then it’s pretty apparent that the Santa Fe Indian School boys basketball team was more Jekyll on Saturday night and St. Michael’s had more of a Hyde thing going on.
On any given night — heck, at any given moment for both clubs — the roles can easily flipflop.
“You never really know what team we’re going to be from game to game,” said SFIS head coach Jason Abeyta after his Braves wrapped up the annual Horsemen Shootout with a 64-58 win against St. Michael’s inside Perez-Shelley Memorial Gymnasium. “One minute we’re playing good and the next we’re letting it slip away.”
SFIS, St. Michael’s and Portales all went 1-2 in this weekend’s round-robin tournament while Silver made off with a 3-0 record after three straight blowout wins that makes them a clear candidate for a deep postseason run in Class 4A. The Colts polished off Portales with a 22-point win earlier Saturday to improve to 12-4 overall.
As well as they have played, SFIS and St. Michael’s have been just the opposite. Each showed a tendency of being wildly erratic and equally tough all at the same time.
“I just don’t understand it sometimes,” said David Rodriguez, Horsemen head coach. “It really is a Jekyll and Hyde thing with us.”
The Horsemen (6-11) had a crazy run in the Shootout, trailing by as many as 32 to Silver, blowing a 20-point halftime lead to Portales before winning in overtime, then trailing SFIS by 20 before cutting it to six by the end of the game. They missed 20 free throws in three games and spent a good portion of Saturday’s contest missing open shots in the paint.
“And we just got out rebounded by the smallest team in 4A, so I’m not sure what to say about that,” Rodriguez said.
SFIS junior James Bridges blistered the Horsemen with 26 points, 12 of which came in a third quarter capped by his transition layup to put the Braves ahead 45-25. He said afterward that he can always tell if he’s about to have a good game based solely on his first long-distance shot each night.
“If that first 3 goes in, I know I’ll have a good one,” he said. “Then I’ll start driving it or going for rebounds. It all works if I can get out on the floor and make that first one.”
Raheem Alonzo added 12 points and Jaden Aguino nine for the Braves, whose lead hovered between nine and 15 points for most of the fourth quarter. It wasn’t until a couple of late buckets in the final minute that the Horsemen got any closer than nine. By then the outcome was already decided.
Dominic Morgan had 12 points to lead St. Michael’s, which has now lost eight of its last nine games. Jevon Montoya had 11 points and Victor Otero nine.
Rodriguez said he spent a good part of the tournament paring down the team’s depth chart. Up next is the district opener Tuesday night at Las Vegas Robertson.
“We’ve got it where our top eight guys are set in their roles and some guys who had been getting minutes for us before the tournament got a little less time out here,” he said.
The key moving forward is just trying to learn a new system, something the Horsemen have had a hard time doing in Rodriguez’s first season as head coach. He said he had four occasions in the first half where players were wandering around lost in the offense he’d drawn up.
“Obviously we just can’t have that,” he said.
It all falls in step with the whole Jekyll and Hyde thing.
“With us, I think our bigger issue is just closing games out,” Abeyta said. “I can count at least three or four times this year where we’ve done so many things right and then let the other team back into it. We had Taos like that, then [Portales on Friday] and then this one almost got away.”
Abeyta said it’s part of the lesson curve that he hopes to iron out in the next few days at practice. That process begins Sunday when the Braves get back on the court for what Abeyta said will not be the standard light workouts.
“Yeah, I think we’re all kind of expecting some hard work because, you know, we have some things we have to get better at,” Bridges said. “If we get a big lead like this we have to finish it off. We keep doing that, too. Letting people in.”
Unlike Jekyll’s alter ego, some things are more easily fixed on a basketball court.
“It’s all the mental side of things,” Abeyta said. “For all teams it’s like that. You have to keep changing the way you do things or stuff like this is going to keep happening.”
TOURNAMENT NOTES
Silver’s 67-48 win over Portales in Saturday’s early game was the Colts’ smallest margin of victory at the tournament. … St. Michael’s broke out new home uniforms for Saturday’s game, wearing freshout-of-the-box kits that replace the older uniforms worn all season. … Portales had more than its fair share of hard luck during the tournament. One player had to have an emergency root canal while two others were out of commission with flu-like symptoms and a fourth was out with an injury.