December
23, 2006
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| Ahmed Hassan scored 35 of his 39 points over the final 21 minutes of the game as Leonia turned a 15-point deficit into a 60-48 win over league rival Cresskill on Friday night. | |
LEONIA -- Not only is senior Ahmed Hassan a two-time first team All-Bergen County player and not only is he within spitting distance of 2,000 career points, but he is also the lone returning varsity letter winner for Leonia, which lost four starter and six seniors to last June's graduation. In short, the Lions go as Hassan goes, and one need look no further than Friday night's game against BCSL-Olympic Division rival Cresskill for proof.
Hassan missed nine of his first 10 shots from the field, he scored just two points in the first quarter and, when Dan Egorow made a three-pointer from the corner with 4:52 to play in the first half, Cresskill was close to running Leonia out of its own gym, sitting pretty with a 15-point lead.
Hassan had scored just four points through the first 11 minutes and knew it was time to change things up. After making 14 of 24 three-pointers in his first two games only to struggle from behind the arc early on Friday night, Hassan decided it was best to take the ball to the basket. Once he started doing that, and once Leonia switched to a zone late in the first half and carried it over into quarter No. 3, it was a whole new ball game.
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| Dan Egorow scored 12 of his team high 28 points in the first quarter as Cresskill got out to a 24-9 lead. |
By pressuring Cresskill’s guards just over halfcourt with a 2-2-1 trap in the second quarter and morphing into a 1-3-1 in the second half with Hassan at the top of both defenses, Leonia (3-0) wrought havoc and engineered a 27-point turnaround. After trailing by as many as 15 in the early going, the Lions blitzed Cresskill, building as much as a 16-point lead in the fourth quarter on the way to a 60-48 win.
Hassan, who scored 35 and 41 points in his first two games, finished with 39 (24 in the second half and all of them from inside the three-point line) and is now averaging 38.3 points per game in his senior season, his fourth as a varsity starter.
“Our defense was definitely the difference tonight. We usually play man, but in the first quarter we were right in their face and they were shooting over us and making them,” said Hassan. “We went to the trap; we forced some steals and got some easy baskets to get us going. We weren’t tired, we focused on keeping up the pressure.”
While Hassan is one of Bergen County’s best offensive players, Cresskill senior Dan Egorow is no slouch either and he was all but unstoppable in the first quarter. He scored six of his team’s first eight points as the Cougars got off early and proceeded to build a lead that ballooned to 15, 24-9, when Egorow hit a three with 4:52 to go in the first half.
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| Leonia's Andrew Levy going in for the uncontested layup that gave the Lions a 34-28 lead. |
That was when Hassan started to heat up. He scored on three straight trips down the floor in a 31 second span to slice the lead back to single digits. And he scored the final five points of the first half, three on a put back and free throw and the other two on a fastbreak layup, as Leonia crept to within 28-22 at the break.
“[Cresskill head coach] Marty Rivard is one of the best ever, his program is a state power and you can’t just do the same things against him over and over and hope they work. It’s not going to happen like that,” said Fran Orlowski, who has been Leonia’s head coach since the 1994-95 season. “We hadn’t shown the 1-3-1, we came out in it to start the third quarter and you saw what happened.”
What happened was Andrew Levy stole the ball on Cresskill’s first possession of the third quarter, set up Hassan on the fastbreak and kicked off 12-0 run that took Leonia from down six to up by six in just 2:36. Hassan’s steal and layup tied the game at 28 at 6:54 of the third and forced a Cresskill timeout. Hassan hit a pull-up jumper to put his team in front, a layup off another Levy steal and assist to stretch the lead, then made a steal and sent in Levy for an uncontested layup to cap the run.
Cresskill was scoreless in the second half until George Pecoraro’s two free throws five minutes in. Hassan scored 14 of Leonia’s 18 points in the third quarter and his prettiest move of the night with 3:35 to play in the game gave the Lions their largest lead of the night to that point. On that play, Hassan drove down the left side of the lane and, while airborne as two defenders converged, he switched the ball to his right hand for a bad angle layup on which he was fouled. He hit the shot and free throw and Leonia had a 50-35 lead.
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| George Pecoraro finished with 8 points for Cresskill, which fell to 2-1 on the season. |
The loss dropped Cresskill, Leonia’s perennial obstacle in the BCSL-Olympic Division, to 2-1 one on the season. Although competitive year in year out, the Lions have not won a league title since 1998 and even in that season they lost twice to the Cougars, who were upset by Emerson in the regular season finale and fell into a tie for first place. Leonia had not beaten Cresskill since their first matchup of the 2003-04 season.
“I haven’t beaten Cresskill since the first time I played them as a freshman,” said Hassan, who has received interest from college programs ranging from Division 1 to Division 3, but is still sorting through his options. “This is a good Christmas present, I guess.”
The loss left Rivard two wins shy of the all-time record for career wins by a Bergen County coach. Rivard (646 wins) is closing in on Chris Donfield, who posted 648 wins in his tenure at Bergen Catholic.
Rivard is one of the best coaches in the history of New Jersey boys basketball and even he had to tip his cap to Hassan on Friday night.
“He makes them the team to beat. He is an outstanding player and we just weren’t able to stop him,” said Rivard. “We weren’t able to help when he went to the basket, he would spilt us and go, and we never forced him to change direction. Our kids knew the plan was to step up, step in and draw a charge or make him go round us. We never did that for whatever the reason.”
Hassan’s monster night overshadowed the play of Egorow, who was dominant in the first quarter but done in later by his team’s inability to break pressure (Cresskill got off only 17 shots in the second half). He is a tough matchup as he has the size to play inside, the ability to put the ball on the floor and shoot from the wings and the athleticism to play in the open floor.
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| Leonia's Jairo Amparo (right) was a key to the Lions' trapping defense. |
Egorow finished with 28 points, but was the only Cougar in double digits. Pecoraro had 8 points, Erik Torrenberg hit two three-pointers to account for his 6 , Caleb King had 4 points and Jason Lee added a field goal.
Leonia’s score sheet was similarly imbalanced, but its four new starters pitched in a variety of ways. Jairo Amparo had four steals to go along with his seven points, Phil Yang added six points, Levy had 4 points to go along with three steals and four assists and Chaz Portero (2 points) was effective inside on the defensive end. Leonia also shot 11 for 12 from the free throw line (the Lions are now 37 of 42 -- 88 percent -- on the season as a team), while Cresskill was 8 of 14 from the stripe.
“It was a total team effort,” said Orlowski. “Our younger guys hung in there in the first quarter when Hassan had only two points and we played great team defense.”
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