By Richard Obert
Down by six points in the final two minutes, with power forward Carlos Johnson fouled out, Mike Bibby turned his son loose inside the Phoenix Shadow Mountain gym on Saturday night.
Sophomore point guard Michael Bibby swished a high-arcing 3-pointer with 1:45 left, then hit a floater along the baseline with four seconds to play, and Shadow Mountain’s basketball season remained alive with a 72-70 victory over preseason No. 1 Tucson Catalina Foothills.
Top-ranked Shadow Mountain (26-3), which lost its only Division II game last week in triple-overtime to Cave Creek Cactus Shadows, advances to Wednesday’s 7:45 p.m. state quarterfinal at Arizona State’s Wells Fargo Arena.
“Ice water,” said coach Jerry Conner, who coached the older Bibby in the mid-1990s when he was making clutch shots on the way to a state championships. “He’s got the genes.”
Mike Bibby is the assistant coach — on paper. But he directs this team and, at times Saturday, he gambled by playing his top two players, including his son, when they both were in foul trouble.
Bibby and sophomore Carlos Johnson returned in the final two minutes of the first half despite three fouls and led a 7-2 run when Catalina Foothills sat its top two players, forward Chaz Mack and guard Austin Nehls, who both had two fouls.
That run enabled Shadow Mountain to take a five-point lead at intermission.
But Mack, who was relentless on the offensive glass, came back with vengeance to start the second half, and leading scorer Nehls started to make shots.
With Johnson fouled out, Catalina Foothills had a 70-64 lead with 1:52 to play.
After Bibby made the 3, Shadow Mountain capitalized on a Catalina Foothills turnover and Darion Spottsville followed in a miss to cut it to one with 1:11 to play.
Tied at 70, Shadow Mountain called time out with 23 seconds left, drawing up a play for Bibby.
“I was a looking for a shot, but there wasn’t anything there, so I had to penetrate and create,” said Bibby, who finished with 27 points after dropping in his floater, which would hold up for the win.
“He’s a point guard out there, and we wanted him to make something happen, make the defensive guy work,” the elder Bibby said. “He played big. Everybody. We need to do the little things to keep this going.”