A week that started with a rousing 19-point comeback ended in the worst-possible fashion for the boys basketball team Friday. A nearly scoreless second quarter against Alvarez doomed the Balers, leading the way for the Balers’ first league loss of the season.
The loss capped a week that started with 19-point comeback against defending league champion Salinas. But the Balers couldn’t return from large deficits twice in one week.
But the game Friday started well for San Benito.
After the Balers jumped to a 9-4 lead in the first quarter, Alvarez, behind sophomore Ronald Turner, went on a 19-0 run spanning the end of the first quarter and throughout the second quarter on its way to a 58-51 win at Mattson Gym.
The loss drops San Benito to 5-1 in league play.
“You can’t play from behind,” Head coach David Kaplansky said. “It’s too good of league to play from behind. Tonight was a great opportunity for us to play well, but we didn’t come ready to play. We didn’t do anything really well tonight.”
San Benito did, however, get off to a fast start thanks to the shooting of Isaiah Acfalle, who scored a team-high 16 points. But the Balers couldn’t withstand the defensive pressure of the athletic Eagles.
Thanks to the aggressive Eagles defense, San Benito turned the ball over 10 times throughout the game, and struggled hitting open shots.
“We just turned the ball over too much,” Kaplansky said. “It’s tough to make a shot when you don’t have the ball. We got in a real bad funk right there in the second quarter, and it is really unfortunate that we weren’t able to gather ourselves until a minute and thirty left. We really didn’t play well tonight. Our hands weren’t ready. We weren’t adapting to their defenses. The guys were real lethargic. We were settling for to many perimeter shots.”
The Eagles, though, found holes in the usually-tough San Benito defense to open up a 24-9 lead.
San Benito could never find a way to stop Turner, who torched the Balers for 25 points.
“They are very gifted,” Kaplansky said. “They are a very athletic team – very dynamic. Their athletes played very well tonight. They did a good job.”
However, after halftime San Benito pulled to within three points. They could never get any closer. Any Baler offensive streak was met quickly with an Eagle run.
The key to the game, though, was the rotating Alvarez defense.
Alvarez stopped the San Benito hot-shooting by switching up the defense throughout the game, to keep them guessing, Alvarez head coach Mark Haddan said.
“We were switching up defenses,” Haddan said. “My voice is almost hoarse because I was yelling out and switching up a lot of defenses on them. Because you can’t give them – they are such great shooters – you cant keep giving them the same look or else they are going to knock them down.”
The Eagles limited Jordan Belton to 11 points. Hyram Miskin was allowed to score 13 points, but Alvarez limited second-chance points. Six Balers scored Friday.
Alvarez played some of the Tri-County Athletic League’s best teams – Salinas and Palma – to close games, but were unable to come away with a victory. Friday’s win was the program’s must-needed signature victory.
“It’s big for us because we’ve been looking for a signature win,” Haddan said. “We’ve been close. We led Salinas. We were beating Palma. We let them off the hook and didn’t get the job down. We are a young team and all of our starters are younger classmen, but we were looking for a signature win and we though we could get one here.”
The Balers, coming off the comeback victory over Salinas underestimated the Eagles, Acfalle admitted.
“We just underestimated them,” he said. “We didn’t play our game again. We just couldn’t hit our open shots. If we hit our shots, we would have won.”
He continued: “It’s a very big let down, because after getting off that insanely I-don’t-know-how-we-did-it win, we wanted to come back and get this win over Alvarez and get to 6-0. But we couldn’t get it done.”
Kaplansky thought the game showed the Balers lack of focus.
“I felt like it was a big let down,” he said. “It was disappointing to see the way we played tonight. Not physically, but in the mental part of the game. That part was really disturbing. We just didn’t seem like we had any mental toughness tonight.”
And it’s surprising considering Wednesday comeback at Salinas.
In a game where the Balers trailed 21-2 midway through the second quarter, San Benito showcased its defensive fortitude in a 39-36 win.
The Balers did struggle on the offensive end with the team’s season-long leading scoring Belton limited to 2 points. Miskin saved the Balers with a game-high 22 points, including four 3-point shots.
“It was crazy,” Kaplansky said after the game. “We came out like a deer in the headlights. We were flat but we started getting it going.”
Sadly, though, that flatness carried over to Friday.
San Benito begins the second half of the league season at North Salinas on Friday. The game starts at 7 p.m.
