NFA boys move on to ECC basketball semifinals

When Griswold played at Norwich Free Academy earlier this season, it was the Wolverines who dictated the tempo and that was troublesome for the Wildcats. NFA decided that it couldn’t let that happen again when the two teams met in the Eastern Connecticut Conference quarterfinals on Saturday afternoon at St. Bernard.
The second-seeded Wildcats were off and running early, much to the chagrin of Griswold, as the Wildcats walked away with the 56-36 win to advance to the ECC semifinals.
NFA will take on (Woodstock/Stonington) in the first semifinal game at 6 p.m. at Waterford High School. The (Centaurs/Bears) advanced with a ( - ) win in the second game of the afternoon Saturday.
"In terms of tempo, we got what we wanted early and converted some shots," NFA coach Neal Curland said. "It would have been real hard for (Griswold coach) Rob (Mileski) to have long offensive possessions which is probably what he wanted had it been a closer game early."
Indeed, that was the plan, but the Wildcats foiled that by scoring 15 of the first 20 points in the game. Six-foot-six junior Trevor Bundy had his way inside early on as he scored four of the first six points for NFA, Sharif Brown scored four of his six points and Mike Mailhot put down a 3-pointer to help the Wildcats build that 15-5 advantage.
Chris Vincent made it 21-10 at the end of the first quarter and then threw a couple of exclamation points down. The senior guard followed that up by connecting on a pair of 3-pointers to open the second quarter and then added another at the buzzer to give NFA the 35-13 halftime lead.
"The offense that they run - that stall offense - we didn’t want them to do that the whole game so we knew we had to score a few so they had to rush their offense," said Vincent who finished with a game-high 18 points."That pushed up the tempo, that’s why we pressed the whole game, too, and got out to a pretty big lead," he added.
"The last game, tempo was at our pace and it was 18-15 at the half," Mileski remembered. "This game, Neal said ‘we’re not going to do that’. They wanted to force the issue and they did."
The 22-point deficit at the half had Mileski searching for a consolation prize in the locker room.
"Our goal at halftime was not to roll over, we wanted to still compete, so I just put some numbers up on the board and said ‘let’s get it to 42-30’, try to get it to a dozen going into the fourth and see what happens," Mileski said.
The Wolverines (15-7) fell a little short of that goal although a 3-pointer by Sean Brackett (14 points) and a basket by Ray Phonthapanh late in the third did reduce the deficit to 16 points. It was to be as close as Griswold was going to get as the Wildcats quickly brought it back up to 20 points, in part, due to the play of six-foot-seven center Darryl Ferguson.
Ferguson, who had a lone jumper in the first half, scored six points in the second, but more importantly blocked five shots and altered about five others. The other NFA "big", Bundy, finished with eight points, all in the first half.
"They played well alternately," Curland said. "We do different things with them, we played them together and now we’re back to one at a time. I thought Trevor played well in the first half and Darryl played well in the second, I thought both of them took a half off. We’re not going to get very far if they don’t come for the whole game."