“You can’t match three’s with two’s.”
North Penn teacher and superfan Diane West summarized the 58-44 loss in one sentence, a game where Central Bucks South’s consistent three-point shooting could not be matched by a slow North Penn offense.
The start of the game was evenly matched with back-and-forth scoring, ending the first quarter 13-9 with South ahead, but South’s Brett Barrett started to get hot with 7 of their points.
“We passed well, and didn’t hold onto the ball too long. North Penn has a nice defense and they do some nice traps with their halfcourt sets, so moving the ball quickly and the open man to get good looks. Brett [Barrett] had a bunch of good looks, and when they were closing out on us dribble drives worked well,” Louie Ditri, CB South head coach said.
The second quarter proved to be a defensive battle, with only 12 points scored: 3 coming from the Knights and 9 from the Titans. After three straight 3-pointers from CB South, North Penn moved into a man defense to try and contain the perimeter. Headed into the half, the Titans remained ahead, 22-12.
“They hit some timely shots to help them, their offense did a good job executing, and they had some real good looks early on and as the game went on, shots started to fall,” Cordell Lord, North Penn head coach said.
Coming out of the half, the Knights looked to apply pressure, putting on a full-court press that would go in and out of use through the third quarter. After a 6-0 run with 3:23 left in the quarter, it felt like North Penn could get something going, but they were quickly shut down by another three 3-pointers, two of which came from the hand of Barrett.
CB South would go on to shoot 60% from beyond the arc, connecting on 9 of their 15 attempts.
“They hit some very timely [threes], especially in the second half, we thought when we went man we started to get on a roll, but every time we gained some momentum, they hit a very timely shot. It’s hard to beat a team when they’re executing very well on both sides,” Lord said.
Heading into the fourth, the score was 40-26 with the Titans starting to pull away, but North Penn was not quick to throw in the towel. After Shane Ward came out of the game with an ankle injury and a Knight’s timeout, they would start to match the shooting of the Titans.
The early scoring by CB South proved to be too much to overcome, even with Ahmar Ghodania and Wyatt Martin starting to find their groove, putting up 11 and 8 respectively. The Knights began to play the foul game with a minute left and would continue to score 7 points in that time, but it wasn’t enough, ending the game 58-44, Titans.
“Some of the shots we normally hit didn’t fall tonight and we have to figure out a way to play through that and be better on the defensive end. There’s not much we can do when shots aren’t falling, we have to find ways to push through that and a big part of that is to get extra stops not let extra rebounds happen, and that kinda hurt us today,” Lord said.
North Penn (3-5, 1-1) will continue conference play at Pennridge on Friday, 12/20, and Central Bucks South (5-3, 2-0) will head to Central Bucks West on the same day for another conference matchup.
North Penn: Godhania 11; Martin 10; Hammond 5; Foust 4; Atkinson 4; Altemus 4; Ward 3; Hall 2; Wood 1.
Central Bucks South: Barrett 21; Thompson 13; Medwid 6; Gies 5; Emido 5; Harrison 4; Adebayo 2; Farrell 2.