Basketball districts outlook
Eight games left, all against district opponents.
Friday’s (Jan. 20) home game for the Tigers (9-8) versus the Pojoaque Valley Elks (12-5) will have plenty of playoff picture speculation and plenty of playoff seeding aftermath attached to it. It will mark the first matchup between the two teams, who are both at the top of the 4A District 2 division, with Taos sitting three games behind the Elks. There will be one more regular season match at Pojoaque Valley on Thursday (Feb. 9) and then another one for the district tournament.
Daemon Ely (#52) leads the way for Taos, leading almost every statistical category for the Tigers, except for 3-point percentage; guard Noah Washington currently tops that list with 38 percent shooting from the arc. The next leading scorer for the Tigers is Isaiah Apodaca (#22) with 13.3 points a game.
The Elks’ top scorer is Derek Sanchez (#2), scoring 24.7 points a game and averaging 3.6 steals a game. The next leading scorer for the Elks is
DJ Jaramillo (#23) with 7.3 points a game.
This season, the Elks have won the Ben Lujan Tournament and defeated the St. Michael’s Horsemen as their big achievements. The biggest breakthrough for Taos this season was their third-place finish in the Hope Christian Invitational and their victory against the perennial Class 2A champs, the Pecos Panthers, at Pecos. No one’s beaten Pecos on their home turf since February 2016.
At an attempt at the transitive properties of basketball from this season’s schedule: Pojoaque Valley has beaten Gallup, who’s beaten Taos; The Tigers have beaten Pecos, who’s beaten Robertson, who’s beaten Pojoaque Valley; both Pojoaque Valley and Taos have lost to the Robertson Cardinals and the Capital Jaguars. On Friday, the two teams will finally get a chance to get a good look at one another and duke it out.
The Tigers are currently ranked 11th in class 4A per MaxPreps, and they are ranked 10th according to the Coach Top 10 Boys Basketball poll. The Elks are currently ranked 6th in class 4A per MaxPreps, and they are ranked 8th according to the Top 10 Boys Basketball poll.