Boys basketball: Nokomis takes defensive battle from Messalonskee

OAKLAND — With sincere apologies for breaking out the cliches, Nokomis coach Earl Anderson believes one to be true above all others.

“Defense travels.”

The Warriors were road warriors, indeed, Tuesday night, holding Messalonskee to a single garbage-time field goal in the fourth quarter in pounding out a 47-33 win in a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class A boys basketball game. Junior guards Alex Grant and Connor Sides led Nokomis with 16 points and 10 points, respectively.

“They really energize us,” Anderson said of his perimeter shooters, who had to pick up some of the slack created by forward Grady Hartsgrove’s early foul trouble. “We always hope it’s contagious, because their energy is constant. It doesn’t matter if it’s a practice drill or every possession of every game, those two are the Energizer bunnies.

“They really do set the tone for us.”

To be certain, Grant and Sides have become accustomed to picking up the slack. The entire Nokomis roster — winners of 13 of their 18 regular-season games — needed to answer for the loss of standout Cooper Flagg from the 2022 Class A state championship squad.

“Word on the street at the start of the season was that we weren’t going to be very good,” Grant said. “We knew that if we all bought in as a team together, one through 13, we can go places. We all knew that.

“Last year, it was obviously a very run-through-Cooper team. Everyone’s role is different from last year. Everybody branching out and doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and contributing in a different way than last year.”

For Messalonskee (6-11), it was a woeful night once Senior Night festivities concluded prior to tip-off.

Held to single digits in three of the four quarters against the Warriors, Messalonskee rallied from a 27-16 halftime deficit with a 10-2 run over the first three minutes of the third quarter to trim the Nokomis lead to just three at 29-26. Senior Daniel Parent hit a trio of 3-pointers in the period and finished with a team-high 14.

But Parent’s final act of the evening, a trey with 48 seconds left in the third to keep the Eagles in it at 37-31, was also Messalonskee’s final act.
“They’re a really tough team, even though their record might not show it,” Sides said of Messalonskee. “But we’re a tough team, too, and we fight. I think it’s shown. We’ve had some really good second halves this season.”

Madden White’s bucket right before the third-period buzzer touched off a 10-0 Warrior run that put the game away. The Eagles’ lone points of the final quarter came on Sam Dube’s bucket with 14.2 seconds remaining, snapping an 0 for 10 from the floor in the fourth for the home team.

A 6 of 18 from the floor in the first half only worsened in the second, with the Eagles finishing at a paltry 30.2 percent efficiency for the night.

“We try to pride ourselves on being pretty good defensively,” said Anderson, whose Warriors pounded the glass, too, in amassing a 28-19 rebounding edge. “We don’t have any magic formula. We work every single day every day in all our defensive breakdown drills. I know this is cliche, but ‘defense travels.’

“Defense wins in the postseason.”