Greyhounds Can’t Find Their Mark

Grandview finishes eighth ||

YAKIMA, Wash. — It started less than ominously with an errant 3-pointer by Tony Vela.

For Grandview, that’s bound to happen now and again. The Greyhounds shoot a lot of 3-pointers, and the majority of those are going to miss the mark.

But then the next five Grandview shots, all of them 2-point attempts, found rim but not net. Then a couple of 3-pointers went wide. And the next four shots after that missed the target.

Grandview's Tony Vela dives for a steal between Mt. Baker's Zach Stalin, left, and Anderson Bass in the 2A state basketball tournament Friday, March 13, 2010 at the SunDome in Yakima, Wash. (Andy Sawyer/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Five minutes and 50 seconds and, for the Greyhounds, there was nothing to show for it. Mount Baker, the Greyhounds’ opponent in Saturday’s fifth/eighth-place game, made excellent use of that time with 12 unanswered points, and the Mounties were well on their way to their 62-55 triumph.

“They weren’t bad shots. They just weren’t going in,” Grandview coach Roy Garcia said. “Tony (Vela) had some great looks, and his mechanics were fine. The shots just were not falling in.”

“Nothing was falling,” Vela said. “I felt really confident coming into this game. I thought for sure we were going to knock down a lot of shots, but they just weren’t falling.”

With their outside game simply not producing, the Greyhounds turned to a more aggressive, attacking style, and Vela ultimately accrued most of his team-high 17 points on drives through the lane.

“I don’t know why our shots weren’t falling,” sighed junior guard Daniel Nielsen, a normally deadeye marksman from long distance whose 15 points included three 3-pointers but also six misses from that range. “So we tried to go at them more, attack the basket, bang the boards to get some rebounds and hopefully draw some fouls, but …”

… but that didn’t work either. Grandview, which finished with an 18-10 record and the eighth-place trophy, simply couldn’t overcome that first-quarter drought. Although they closed to within 50-49 with 2:49 remaining on an NBA-distance trey by Nielsen, the Mounties responded with a driving layup by guard Caleb Buchanan and a layup by center Zach Stalin, then salted the game away at the foul line.

“You gotta give credit to (the Mounties), they came out ready to play and we came out a little sluggish,” said Grandview junior guard Christian Schrank. “I think we were all just worn down after coming out here and playing hard for four days. We’re small and we know that, and it’s tough. But we play with as much heart as anybody here.”

The height differential, though, was profound.

For much of the game the Greyhounds, with their starting lineup averaging 5-foot-11, were giving up an average of three inches per man. It cost them dearly in the rebounding battle, with 6-foot-6 Spencer Backstrom and the 6-5 Stalin combining for 21 rebounds to lead Mount Baker (19-9) to a dominating 54-30 advantage on the boards. The pair also combined for 31 points, with Stalin going 6-for-11 in the lane and spending much of the game at the foul line to rack up a game-high 19 points.

“Those guys were definitely a lot bigger than us, that’s for sure,” Vela said. “But we fought hard. We just couldn’t quite get it done.”

But with the team losing only two seniors, Derek Newhouse and Jericho Ramos, Grandview can look forward to the possibility of improving on this year’s trophy run.

“This team plays with so much heart,” Schrank said. “We just came up a couple of inches short.”

Figuratively and literally.