By CLAUDE SCILLEY

When they began substituting freely almost from the start of the basketball game, it clearly looked like the Algonquin Thunder’s plan was to run the shorthanded St. Lawrence Vikings out of the gym.

“It’s what I thought they would do,” Vikings coach Barry Smith said.

It might have worked, too, but for one thing.

“From the very first, we were on fire,” Smith said, after his team defeated Algonquin 84-67 in an Ontario Colleges Athletic Association men’s basketball game Saturday afternoon.

St. Lawrence scored the first seven points of the game, and that lead grew through 11-3, 20-7 and eventually 26-11 by the end of the first quarter.

By that point, Smith wondered, “Maybe (Algonquin coach Trevor Costello) didn’t feel that he could run us out of the gym.”

The Vikings played essentially with five players. A sixth played some—mostly while Brad Richards was getting an injury tended in the third quarter—and a seventh played just a little bit. Though they had two distinct lapses, those five recovered nicely each time and even at the end of the game showed no obvious fatigue.

The two lapses came in the second and third quarters and were almost identical. In the first, Algonquin scored the first 10 points of the quarter to cut the St. Lawrence lead to five. By halftime, however, a 9-2 run had restored the cushion to 13 points, 43-30. Algonquin scored 13 of the first 18 points in the third quarter, again cutting the lead to five, but the Vikings responded with an 11-2 run of their own and the Thunder never got closer than 10 points after that.

“With the number of players that we’re playing, we get a little tired every once in a while,” Smith said. “We call it taking little breaks. So we take a little break and that 13-point lead is down to five or six. That’s when we call a timeout and say, ‘Lookit, guys, let’s get ourselves refocused.’”

It would often be a little thing that betrayed the Vikings’ wavering focus. “There was a free throw where we didn’t box out and the guy got the rebound and put it back in,” Smith said. “Down here a guy took a break and let the guy shoot a three right in his face.

“That’s a quick five points. At this level you can’t take breaks.”

It was a landmark game for the Vikings for two reasons: First, it was the first time in four years that they’ve defeated Algonquin. In doing so by 17 points, they gained the tie-breaker, after having lost in Ottawa in November by 14.

That means that should the teams end the regular schedule tied, St. Lawrence would be favoured, and that’s no small consideration in a league where six teams in the middle of the pack, including the Vikings and Thunder, are within two and a half games of each other, and only four of them will make the playoffs.

In winning their sixth game in a row—to improve to 8-5—the Vikings got 23 points from Donald Gibson, 21 from Jaz Bain, 15 from Shaqeem Downey and 14 from Andrew Dawkins. Bain scored 13 of his points in the first quarter, and he finished the game with five three-point baskets.

Murphy Beya led all scorers in the losing cause with 27 points, 21 of them in the second half. Brandon Burke scored 18 for the Thunder, who lost for the second night in a row to fall to 6-7. Burke got 10 of his points in the second quarter.

St. Lawrence travels to Toronto for two games next weekend, Friday at Seneca, 7-5, and Saturday at George Brown, 6-6.