The Brookwood bantam/Benjamin AAA Bullets defeated the West Island Lakers 65-44 Sunday afternoon at Riverdale High School in Pierrefonds.
The Bullets never relinquished a lead they took early on thanks to a shining performance from point guard Chris Morales who sparked the offence all game long and solid play by forward Francis Bemry.
"We did what we wanted to do which was to remain focal at man-to-man and it worked really well. The guys played really well down the stretch team-wise and the big man (Bemry) did the job inside," said Brookwood's head coach Sheldon Louis.
After 4:30 of play in the first quarter, the Bullets had the lead 13-4. But the Lakers kept them on their heels from that point on. After two successful free throws by the Lakers, Reece Palfy nailed a three-pointer to tighten up the score..
Morales started the second quarter strong with a basket that put his team seven points ahead. He added another one two minutes later to make the score 22-13. Anderson Dessources who tallied up six points during the first half got four of them during the second quarter.
He slickly evaded a defender in the bottle for the lay-up basket to put the score at 27-17 with less than three minutes left in the quarter. He then accepted point guard Joshua Mein's pass before netting another one with a little more than a minute remaining.
At the half, Brookwood led 31-23. Back on the court after a rest at the end of the second quarter, Morales spiced things up for Brookwood in the beginning of the second half. He fed Mein for a three-pointer and then layed-up his way to another two points seconds later to make the score 37-25. Nicely set up by Mein, Morales hustled his way to the basket to augment his team's lead seconds later.
The Bullets continued their domination throughout the third quarter. Daniel Klorpelidis intercepted the ball in his zone and rushed to the Lakers' basket to give his team an 11-point lead with 2:25 remaining in the quarter. At the beginning of the fourth quarter, the Bullets had an 18-point lead.
The Lakers attempted a comeback before the end. Palfy first threw a bombshell of a pass to Jamail Fisher for the basket in the opening minutes. Fisher's strong hustle brought the score to 50-36 seconds later. The forward helped his team close the gap by adding four more points in the next two minutes. With 3:25 remaining in the game, the Lakers had tightened the score to 55-44 but that's as close as they would get. Brookwood shut them down for the rest of the game to confirm the win.
"It was a good learning experience for us. We have a young team. We did pretty good against a well-organized and well-coached team," said Lakers' head coach Juraj Pojtek.
