TOURNAMENT RIVALS

Borough representatives Archbishop Molloy and St. Francis Prep gave Queens a good name on December 29, when the 3rd annual Aviator Holiday Hoops Tournament concluded in Brooklyn. They did not deliver a top finish - Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, New Jersey, prevented that from happening - but against eight New York-area Catholic boys’ basketball teams, taking second and third is not a bad way to approach the heart of the divisional season in January.
Molloy head coach Jack Curran, whose Stanners suffered a narrow defeat against CBA in the title game, was satisfied.
“We always hope we’re gonna win,” he said, calling the final contest his team’s best performance all year. “You worry more about the second [of the tournament’s three games]. This is a team we have never seen before. I thought our kids did a great job.”
Molloy, now 5-2 in non-division play, approached the CBA game by nipping Brooklyn Collegiate 69-67, and then downing St. Mary’s (Manhasset, Long Island) by a more comfortable 11 points. The Stanners led CBA for most of Monday night’s proceedings, entering the half with a 32-24 lead and holding a seven-point margin after the third quarter. CBA did not take the lead until early in the fourth, when a tip-in rebound basket and a subsequent field goal helped the Colts pull ahead by one.
The final two minutes were frantic, with Jin Hong, Molloy’s converted senior center, at the eye of the scrum. With Molloy up 58-57 and 37 seconds left, he made a bad pass under his own basket that was stolen for a decisive CBA field goal. With Molloy down in the waning seconds, Curran’s hopes for a pass to Hong were left unrealized, as senior guard Russell Smith and junior guard Ernest Rouse missed a trio of three-point attempts and the Colts held on at the buzzer.
“If you get the ball, hold it,” Curran said of Hong’s flub. “It’s a nervous play. There was nobody around him. He could have dribbled. … We made a lot of mistakes during the game. It’s just that that one was at the wrong time.”
“When you’re a player, sometimes you just forget what the coach tells you and you just act on instinct,” Smith said. “He forgot we had a timeout left. You can’t knock him. It’s a mistake. … At the end of the day, he’s our teammate.”
Smith was the Stanners’ top scorer on Monday, with his 23 tallies eclipsing a 16-point performance by Rouse in a game where Molloy’s ball-handling duties were nobly shared in pressure situations. After four days of play at the Aviator Sports & Recreation complex in Brooklyn, Smith was named the tournament MVP, and he scored his 1,000th career point this weekend. On Monday, his aggressive play and off-balance layups drew the attention of the Floyd Bennett Field audience, with CBA’s supporters consistently clamoring for traveling calls that did not come until the all-important final minute.
“He’s pretty much the same player [he was last season], a little stronger, making passes more to his teammates,” Curran said.
“Last year, I tried to make my own scoring opportunities. This year, I’m trying to make those scoring opportunities come to me,” Smith said.
“I got my 1,000th point here, so I’ll always remember this place,” he added.
Despite the defeat, Curran was generally buoyant after the game, heaping praise upon the Stanners’ perimeter defense - how else were the trigger-happy Colts so easily stifled in the first half? - and acknowledging that Molloy’s zone defense made stopping CBA’s tall men a difficult task.
“You’re gonna make more mistakes when you play zone,” he said.
He also praised the clutch shooting of Stanners’ junior guard Duke Stanojevic, whose three-pointers provided the nexus of a pair of third-quarter runs.
St. Francis Prep, now 6-4 overall, had an experience less successful than Molloy’s, but it was probably less painful. The Terriers beat Brooklyn’s Tilden 55-36 on Friday evening, and then lost to CBA - by a very convincing 71-32 - for the right to play in the championship. They took third place after besting St. Mary’s by 15 points on Monday, leaving the court a few minutes before Molloy and CBA made their entrances.
St. Edmund Prep and Kamehameha, of Brooklyn and Kahuku, Hawaii, were the other two members of the tournament’s eight-team bracket. They were eliminated from title contention on Friday and Saturday, respectively.
Molloy, of course, learned a harder lesson. But Smith believes the Stanners will emerge from their near-miss with an important early-season message.
“It’s gonna make us a lot more experienced,” he said of the loss. “We need games like these. Sometimes we need games to bring us back down to earth.”