Following a 3-point basket by Theo Rocca in the last two minutes of Friday’s Central Suburban League South division showdown at Beardsley Gym, Evanston’s scoreboard operator mistakenly tacked on three additional points to the home team’s side of the board.
It was the closest thing the Wildkits had to a scoring run all night.
On a night when almost everybody’s scoring average took a direct hit, Glenbrook North’s defense clamped down on the Wildkits and handed them a 49-31 defeat. The unbeaten Spartans improved to 8-0 overall --- 2-0 in league play --- while Evanston fell to 6-2 and 1-1, respectively.
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GBN looked like the team to beat in the conference while forcing 19 turnovers and limiting the hosts to 38 percent shooting (13-of-34). Evanston only shot two free throws and was charged with five offensive fouls in the first half, a testament to the clever and physical man-to-man defense employed by the Spartans.
The Wildkits will attempt to bounce back Saturday at the Team Rose Shootout. They’ll face Marian Catholic at 2 p.m. at Mount Carmel High School.
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Asked if it was a case of great defense trumping good defense in a high school basketball game, Evanston head coach Mike Ellis wasn’t quite ready to go overboard in praise of the winners even though GBN held the Kits to a season low point total.
“You should give credit to Glenbrook North’s intensity on defense,” said Ellis. “We probably didn’t score on any back-to-back possessions, and we couldn’t get any momentum going on offense. Their defense WAS better than ours tonight. But I thought a lot of what happened was self-inflicted. We didn’t seem to want to play hard off the ball. They played harder off the ball, on both ends of the court, than we did.
“(A ratio of) Nineteen turnovers to eight assists is not going to win many games for you. We rely on our seniors to make plays in big moments but they didn’t come through. They’re good enough to play through that kind of defense and we didn’t do that tonight.”
Rocca paced the Wildkits with 14 points, but only got off three field goal attempts in the first half. Brandon Watson added 10 points on 4-of-11 shooting from the floor.
Glenbrook North’s Division I football tight end, Patrick Schaller, stashed in 12 of his game-high 14 points to put the game out of reach in the fourth quarter. Josh Fridman, Sam Lappin and Owen Giannoulias each netted 10 points for the winners.
A 17-11 halftime score in North’s favor at halftime saw the two teams combine for just 11 baskets in 38 tries. A scoop shot by point guard Watson with 6 minutes, 54 seconds on the third quarter clock was just the start of a four-minute scoring drought by the hosts and they fell behind 29-19 by the end of the third quarter.
Ian Peters of ETHS gave the host team some hope when he swished a 3-pointer to start the final period, but the 6-foot-7 Schaller answered with a long distance shot of his own and added four more layups before the final buzzer sounded.
“We didn’t convert the opportunities we had around the basket, either,” said Ellis. “We just didn’t have any flow on offense. We had a lot of miscues early in the game (12 turnovers in the first two periods) and that didn’t help.”
