Monday, February 1, 2010

By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director

Wesley Dickinson scored a game-high 22 points for Dwight-Englewood, which knocked off St. Mary, 53-47, to win its first game in the Bergen County Jamboree since 2002.

OAKLAND – There are some coaches that have used zone defenses to craft Hall of Fame careers. Coaches like Jim Boeheim at Syracuse and John Cheyney, formerly of Temple University, have ridden their unique matchup zone techniques to reach the highest levels of college basketball. There are other coaches who see the ‘zone’ as just anther four letter word, an affront to the purist vision of the game of basketball.

Then there are coaches like Dwight-Englewood’s Eli Goldberger who lives by the saying, ‘Hey, whatever works.’

What worked for the Bulldogs against Palisades Park in a huge BCSL-Olympic Division matchup on Thursday night, a game that Dwight-Englewood needed to qualify for the Bergen County Jamboree, and what worked once they got there against St. Mary was an active 3-2 zone that has flummoxed the opposition.

Dwight-Englewood used it for a majority of the game against Pal Park and then used it almost exclusively against St. Mary and it carried the Bulldogs through the rough spots in a 53-47 opening round win, their first in the Jambo since making a run to the Final 4 back in 2002.

Harun Tolbert scored a team-high 14 points for St. Mary.

Because all of the Bulldogs’ starters have length and quickness, the zone in the natural fit for a bunch of players that can get hands in passing lanes and cut off driving lanes.

“I think with our teams length, we can bother a lot of shooters outside and we can pack in the zone so that they don’t get a lot of inside touches,” said D-E senior Colby Podesta. “We’ve been pretty committed to it the last couple of games and it worked really well for us today.”

So well in fact that Dwight-Englewood held St. Mary to just six points in the first quarter and just 18 in the first half as the Bulldogs grabbed a 23-18 lead at the break. It took a 6-0 run in the final 2:14 of the second quarter for the Gaels to even get that close.

“We had a stretch there where we missed a couple of layups and a couple of free throws in the first half and had an 11-point lead. If we convert a couple of those it could have been a 17 or 18-point lead and it might have been a different game,” said Goldberger, who got his first Jambo win in his first appearance in the tournament. “But hats off to them. They came on late in the second quarter and we had trouble slowing them down once they got going early in the third quarter.”

Dwight-Englewood point guard Zach Hodges scored 10 of his 12 points after halftime.

The key to breaking the zone is knocking down jump shots or pushing the ball up the floor before it can get set up. St. Mary was able to do both of those in a 17-2 run that started with the last six points of the first half and continued through Jeremy Thomas’ putback of a missed shot that gave the Gaels’ a 30-25 lead with 3:48 to go in the third quarter.

A Thomas basket on the fastbreak off an assist from Harun Tolbert gave St. Mary its largest lead of the game a 32-26 27 seconds later. Two three-pointers by Ryan Vettoso also helped St. Mary find its rhythm.

“We don’t shoot the ball well overall as a team. We only have two, maybe three kids that are even mildly consistent shooting the outside shot, so we always struggle when teams play zone against us. We try to counter it by getting the ball to the high post or even down low, but they did a good job of taking that away,” said St. Mary head coach Matt Stone. “We had two threes in that [17-2 run] and I don’t think we hit another one the rest of the second half and that hurt us. We had a couple of good looks, we just couldn’t knock ‘em down.”

Kyle Dadika scored 13 points for St. Mary, which fell to 10-4 on the season.

Dwight-Englewood regained its footing with a 9-1 run to close the third quarter. Freshman Keion Osbourne nailed a three-pointer to tie the game at 33 and Zach Hodges scored on the fastbreak to give Dwight-Englewood a 35-33 lead heading into the fourth quarter.

Andrew Spanarkel scored inside to open the fourth quarter and forge the final tie of the game and St. Mary had a 39-36 lead after two straight driving layups by Tolbert, but D-E responded with a 7-0 run that gave it the lead for good. Senior A.J. Redmond hit two straight baskets to give the Bulldogs the lead back for good. His bucket off an assist from Hodges with 4:27 left gave his team at 40-39 lead and his spin move in the paint with 3:24 left gave Dwight a 45-41 lead.

St. Mary crept back to within one point at 46-45 on Kyle Dadika’s tap-in with 2:49 left, but the Gaels missed two free throws 40 seconds later after Hodges stepped in and made a short jumper to open a three-point lead. Dwight-Englewood made 5 of 7 free throws in the final minute to maintain its advantage and even one that it missed turned into a positive.

Up 50-47 with 33 second left, Osbourne missed the front end of a one-and-one that, but before St. Mary could get to the other end in a one-possession game, Osbourne stepped in front of the St. Mary ballhandler, established his position and forced a turnover that led to Wesley Dickinson’s two made free throws with 30 seconds left pushed the lead to five, 52-47, and just about ended the game.

“That was a huge play. For a freshman to have the presence of mind to not put his head down after missing a free throw, but to jump right in there and cause the turnover was a huge play,” said Goldberger. “Keion made a few of them today and you could point to one play that every guy out there made for us today as being instrumental in this win.”

Dwight-Englewood senior AJ Redmond scored 6 of his 7 points in the fourth quarter.

Dickinson continued to impress as he scored a game-high 22 points. He scored all six of his fourth quarter points from the free throw line, not bad for a 50-percent free throw shooter coming into the game. Hodges scored 10 of his 12 points after halftime, Redmond scored all 7 of his in the second half and Osbourne finished with 8, including two three-pointers. Podesta had two field goals for the 19th-seeded Bulldogs, who improved to 11-4 on the season and will play No. 3 Old Tappan in the Round of 16 on Saturday in a 12:00 p.m. start at Northern Highlands.

“This was our first opportunity in the Jambo and we were all really excited. We wanted to stay away from jittery, we just wanted to be excited, be loose and be confident that we could win,” said Dickinson, a sophomore. “We are not just happy to make it here, we want to go far. There was a lot of people here, it was a loud crowd and we love playing games in this kind of atmosphere.”

Tolbert lead St. Mary with 14 points and Dadika added 13. David Capriola finished with 8 points, Thomas and Vettoso each added 6 and Spanarkel had the other field goal for the Gaels, who fell to 10-4 with the loss. All is not lost, however, as St. Mary head back into league play with a 9-1 record, a game in front of Wood-Ridge in the BCSL-National Division.

“One of our goals every year is to make the county tournament, but obviously when you get here you want to win,” said Stone. “We have to refocus now and try to win a league championship.”

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