Sometimes a coach will say his team “earned” a defeat.
That was the tale Friday night at the Doghouse as New Albany squandered a late lead and dropped a 48-47 heartburn special to Evansville North.
Delavion Crenshaw, a 6-foot senior lefty who came off the bench, sealed the victory with a right-corner three at the buzzer, prompting a frenzied celebration that nearly carried the green-clad Huskies squad into the Vincennes Street lobby. The win snapped an eight-game losing streak for North (4-10).
The Bulldogs (9-7) hit eight of their first 10 shots and raced to a 17-9 lead after one quarter. North clawed back with a 9-1 run for its first lead at the 3:44 mark of the second quarter, and the score was tied at 24 at halftime.
New Albany led 41-35 after three quarters, and a basket by Julien Hunter, who scored a team-high 22 points, gave the Dogs their largest lead, 45-35, three minutes into the fourth.
New Albany aided North’s closing 13-2 run with poor shots, three turnovers and 2-of-6 free throw shooting en route to a 6-of-15 effort on the night.
“We looked good early,” New Albany coach Jim Shannon said. “I thought we just got lackadaisical. (Evansville North) played a great game. It’s not like they didn’t deserve to win. They beat us on the boards. You can’t go 6 of 15 from the free-throw line like we did and expect to win games. You can’t.”
Nursing a two-point lead, New Albany had fouls to give at the end and burned two after Maddox Schmelz missed a pair of free throws with 8.2 seconds left in the game. North in-bounded from under its own basket with 2.1 seconds left, and McKinney shook free for a much better look than Shannon wanted.
“We talked about everybody stick your man hard to the three-point line,” he said. “If they go back door and get a layup , Tucker (Biven) will be there to help, we’ll go to overtime if we don’t stop them. Don’t foul, but don’t give them a three at the buzzer, a Hail Mary. But that’s what we did. You’ve gotta really get aggressive and really fight him to his outside and make him go back door. We just let him pop out and get it.”
Shannon didn’t try to hide his frustration.
“It’s a game we should’ve won, as poorly as we played. We still had a 10-point lead with four minutes to go, but again, we get in a situation where we make a steal and we throw it right away. Because we haven’t learned how to play with a lead.
“You’ve gotta be smart. We’ve got people yelling in the crowd, just shoot it, and our guys turn around and let it fly. It’s like. ‘What are you doing, we’re not doing that.’ Let them chase us a little bit. … There were so many mistakes in that game. It wasn’t just one play at the end. As bothersome as it is to me, everybody had a little something to do with the loss.
“if we’re gonna go up to the free throw line and hit 40 percent, it’s like a turnover. You gotta go up there and hit 70 percent. We were 3-of-12 on threes. If we hit three or four more free throws and a couple more threes, we probably win by 11 or 12, but we didn’t.”
It’s the kind of game a team needs to forget, and fortunately, the Dogs get a chance to wash the upset out of their system when the improved Jasper Wildcats visit on Saturday night at 7:30.
“At this time of year you’ve just gotta move on,” Shannon said. “You’ve gotta get ready for the next game.”
