By CLAUDE SCILLEY
You kind of get it.
When a basketball team has a chance to avoid a nine-hour bus trip to Sarnia in February, and comes up eight points short, it’s easy to understand why a coach might be in an ugly mood.
Uglier, St. Lawrence Vikings coach Barry Smith said, than he’s been for a long time.
“We played like shit,” Smith said, after his team was beaten 77-69 by the Centennial Colts on the final day of the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association men’s basketball schedule.
“There was no sense of urgency from our guys. We get to host a playoff game if we win, and now we’ve got to try and win on the road to get to (the championship tournament).”
By losing their third game in a row, the Vikings finished the regular year 12-8, the same as Centennial, but St. Lawrence finds itself relegated to fifth place by virtue of having lost both games with the Colts this year.
The top two teams in each division get an automatic bid into the conference tournament. The other four berths go to teams that finish third through sixth that win cross-over qualifying games. The fifth-place finish means the Vikings will play the team that finished fourth in the West division, Redeemer, in Ancaster.
The Vikings ultimately dodged the dreaded trip to Sarnia when Redeemer won at Lambton Saturday afternoon, 93-78.
A Lambton victory was still in the cards, however, when the Vikings collapsed in the second half of the fourth quarter against Centennial.
St. Lawrence had taken its first lead since the first quarter, 53-52, with the first basket of the fourth quarter. The lead changed hands six times in the first four and a half minutes of the final period, and the score was tied on another occasion, 62-62, but Centennial took over at that point, with an 11-3 run that had the Colts leading by eight with about two minutes to play.
The Vikings, who erased a 15-point second-quarter deficit on the strength of their three-point shooting, couldn’t find that range again. They got the deficit down to six points with 90 seconds left in the game but mustered just one more basket the rest of the way.
“We don’t have a deep enough team for three guys not to play well,” Smith said, dismissing the fact that his team scored just seven points in the final five and a half minutes of the game as “we didn’t make plays.”
“(Centennial) made plays down the stretch.”
Smith made reference to the Colts’ uniforms, an off-putting shade somewhere between khaki and lime green. “That lime green, does that not stand out?” he mused. “Why did we keep passing to the lime green team?”
Joseph Wani finished the game with 24 points for Centennial, while Ian Francis scored 19.
“It’s not as if we didn’t have a scouting report,” Smith said. “We said 34 (Francis) and 11 (Wani) are the two guys we had to stop. (Instead) they scored half their points.
“There were certain things that we wanted to do on big No. 11. In the first half we didn’t want him to catch the ball. We wanted to give him the 10-foot shot. He went 5-for-7, so at halftime, we were only down a couple of points, and we changed out philosophy: Deny the ball and then go out and play tight on him … so tight that you’re going to make him put the ball on the floor, and then the team has to be ready to help.
“We didn’t deny him at all.”
Centennial, which scored 27 points in the fourth quarter, got seven of those points from the free-throw line, from where the Colts were a collective 13-for-13 in the game.
Andrew Dawkins finished the game with 21 points for St. Lawrence. Donald Gibson scored 16, though he ended the game on the bench, clearly in Smith’s doghouse. Taylor Reddick, who came off the bench to hit four three-point baskets, scored 14 points for the Vikings and Jaz Bains, who spent about 10 minutes on the bench in the middle of the second half with four fouls, scored a dozen.
