SFIS pleased with quality win
Braves advance to semifinal Friday against Sandia Prep
It’s the little things a basketball team does that can warm a coach on a cold winter night.
Displaying execution and desire to grab an errant shot.
Pressuring a listless team into mistakes at key moments.
Making the extra pass that finds the open man under the basket.
Jason Abeyta was in pure coaching bliss Wednesday night watching the Santa Fe Indian School Braves do the little things well enough to produce a 51-35 win over East Mountain in the District 5-4A boys basketball quarterfinal in the Pueblo Pavilion. SFIS advances to the district semifinal at Albuquerque Sandia Prep at 7 p.m. Friday for a spot in the 5-4A championship game in Bernalillo on Saturday.
The kind of execution the Braves (13-13) showed against the Timberwolves would be ideal against the Sundevils as well. They held East Mountain (12-15) to just 35.9 percent shooting from the field (14-for-39), outrebounded the Timberwolves 22-16, forced 18 turnovers and shot a steady 21-for-40 on the offensive end.
Abeyta said he spent much of the season working on those little things to get the Braves ready for the rigors of the postseason, because simply running and pressing their way past teams wasn’t going to work every time.
“It took a while, but they started to buy in and that’s where it’s at right now,” Abeyta said. “We should be OK. Just got to rebound and defend.”
What looked like a tight battle on paper — the teams split road wins in the regular-season series — never materialized as SFIS jumped out to a 22-9 lead on Kurt Candelaria’s layup with 5:43 left in the first half.
Braves junior forward James Bridges said the
team looked at the district tournament as a chance to turn the page on some bad habits and start developing good ones to carry it into a likely Class 4A State Tournament berth.
“Keeping teams down is one of our main priorities,” Bridges said. “We usually like to let teams stick around, but this time we’re cutting that off and starting a new chapter in the basketball season.”
And the best way to cut that lifeline off is with some oldfashioned hustle. East Mountain cut the margin to 22-16 in the second quarter and 35-28 in the third, but the Braves came up with big steals off of their press and outworked the bigger Timberwolves for second-chance opportunities that pushed the lead back up to double digits.
After Timberwolves wing Aaron Talamante hit a 10-footer to cap a 7-0 run in the second quarter, Tolaska HuntsAlong came up with a putback, then he and Thomas Lucero had consecutive steals and layups that pushed the lead to 28-16 with 2:44 left in the first half.
When Talamante drained a 3-pointer in the third to whittle the Braves’ lead to seven, Lucero had a steal and HuntsAlong had another steal and layup that sparked a 9-0 spurt to close the quarter and make it 44-28, SFIS. HuntsAlong led the Braves with 13 points.
“It felt good to make the right play,” Braves senior guard Raheem Alonzo said. “The game just came to us [against the Timberwolves], and that felt good.”
East Mountain, coached by 1983 Pecos graduate and former St. Michael’s girls assistant Joe Vigil, never got into a consistent rhythm almost from the start. Vigil called a timeout just 1:17 into the game and SFIS already up 5-0 because of the lackluster intensity he saw on the court.
“We came out flat and not mentally prepared to play,” Vigil said. “We talked about that before the game — are we complacent with our season? Or are we going to show up and play basketball? This is a good team [SFIS] and we were able to split and this was the rubber match. You just got to show up and play basketball, and we didn’t.”
The Timberwolves were coming off a 50-42 win over Albuquerque Bosque School on Tuesday, and Abeyta knows the challenge of playing an intense district tournament game on consecutive days. The past two seasons, the Braves navigated the entire ladder of the district tournament to get to the title game. It was why he employed the press.
“We sped them up a little bit in the beginning,” Abeyta said. “I think playing [Tuesday] night — and from what I hear was a pretty tight game — that helped us get them tired.”
It’s those little things, though, that can show up in a big way come this time of year.