BATH — With his team trailing by three points to Winslow with under two minutes to play, Morse High School boys basketbal coach Sam Hayes wasn’t comfortable.

“I’m pretty worried. They’re a great team. They’re certainly the best team we’ve played,” Hayes said. “We’re down three, we’re looking at trying to get to the glass at that point and maybe get a foul. If we don’t we’ve still got a minute to play.”

Hayes’ best case scenario is exactly how the game played out. After a Winsow missed free throw, the Shipbuilders got a layup and free throw from Ethan Winglass with just under a minute left to tie the game. After a Winslow miss, Winglass made another layup with 41 seconds left, and Morse held on for the 46-44 win.

These team could meet again in the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class B championship, but if they meet in the tournament, it won’t be until the Class B state game. Morse, now 9-2, is among the top teams in Western B. Winslow, now 10-1, leads Eastern B.

After Morse’s Keegan McDonough missed a free throw with 17.6 seconds left, the Black Raiders had a chance to tie the game. Trenton Bouchard was fouled with 1.6 seconds left, and missed the front end of the one-and-one try.

Winslow led 44-41 with just over a minute to play, but with the chance to make it a two possesssion game, missed the front end of a one-and-one try. The Shipbuilders went inside to Winglass, who converted the old-fashioned three point play to tie the game with 57.1 seconds left.

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For most of the game, Morse played a slow, deliberate offense, but when the Shipbuilder rebounded a Winslow miss with 50 seconds left, they ran, and found Winglass for the go-ahead layup with 41 seconds to play.

“Our whole deal against them is, we have to slow it down and run our offense. They’re a really aggressive team,” Winglass, who scored 18 points, said. “If we break it, we’ll get up and run, and that gave us a couple transition buckets.”

It was a poor shooting night for Winslow, which made just 5 of 10 free throws and was 3 for 21 from 3-point range. The Black Raiders didn’t make a three until Nason Lanphier hit one with 3:52 left in the third quarter.

“That’s not usually us. We make two more of those, we’re all set,” Winslow coach Jared Browne said. “A tough shooting night all around.”

Morse’s defensive goal was to slow the game down and try to keep Lanphier (19.6 points per game) and Justin Martin (19.3 ppg) from taking over the game. Both Lanphier and Martin had 10 points.

“With Lanphier and Martin, they average about 40 points per game. Their whole team scored, what, 44?” Winglass said. “We just made them do stuff they don’t want to do. They like to get up and run, and we slowed the ball down. That’s a really low scoring game, and that’s what they don’t want.”

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Added Hayes: “We know Lanphier and Martin are their big guns. Don’t get me wrong. They’ve got, like six people who can shoot the three, and I understand that, but when you’re looking at almost 40 points per game between two people, you have to at least slow them down a little bit.”

Winslow held an early 10-4 lead before Morse closed the first quarter on a 7-0 run to take an 11-10 lead. The Shipbuilders led by one, 19-18, at the half, and while the teams traded the lead six times in the third quarter, Morse maintained its one point lead, 33-32, going into the fourth.

Trailing by two points midway through the fourth, Winslow tied the game and took the lead on back-to-back steals and layups by Bouchard and Josh Kervin. A Martin free throw gave Winslow a 44-41 lead with 2:04 to play.

Defensively, the Black Raiders tried to keep Winglass, the conference’s leading scorer at 24.4 points per game, in check.

“Our defense was what kept us in this and gave us a chance. We just couldn’t put it away,” Browne said. “We know they want to try to bang it inside to Winglass, and we organized our defense to take that away. Every time they have the ball, they’re working from one side of the floor to the other, trying to get him the ball. It’s going to slow the game down a lot.”

McDonough scored 18 points and grabbed 11 rebounds for Morse. Martin had 13 rebounds and three blocks for Winslow.

Travis Lazarczyk — 861-9242

tlazarczyk@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @TLazarczykMTM


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