The Garden City Telegram

  Add Your Comment | Read (0) Comments

Caging the Cougars: It's another crazy win for Busters.

Published 2/13/2012 in Sports

By ADAM HOLT

aholt@gctelegram.com

Call it a bottom-line win. As in, the bottom line was, the Broncbusters won.

There were ups and downs for both the Garden City Community College men's basketball team and the visiting No. 13 Barton Cougars. There were plenty of minutes too, as they battled to a double-overtime contest that the Busters edged out, 85-82, at the Perryman Athletic Complex on Saturday.

Chauncy Williams willed the Busters to a win with another hot-shooting game, and Carl Porter was Garden City's best player in the two overtime periods, as GCCC (18-7, 6-5 Jayhawk Conference) avenged a loss in the teams' previous meeting in Great Bend.

For Busters head coach Kris Baumann, Garden City's win was the kind that shaves years off a coach's life. For Barton coach Craig Fletchall, there was little he could do but tip his cap to his opponent. He even made a point to stop into the Busters' locker room and do so in person.

"I just said that it was a war and congratulated them. It is what it is," said Fletchall, whose team dropped to 21-4, 7-4 in conference play. "Played 50 minutes and both teams laid it on the line. I admire both clubs, and Kris, obviously. It's kind of out of character, but shoot, it could have gone either way. It was one of those things where neither team deserved to lose and we did."

As for the game itself, where to start?

Garden City had a 41-25 lead early in the second half. Then Barton scored the next 16 points of the game.

By the 4:35 mark, the Cougars led 63-43. The Busters couldn't make a basket, couldn't grab a rebound and couldn't stop Carl Wallace or Algie Key, who got to the free throw line again and again.

But with the score 65-56, Williams got a long pass off a Barton miss and had a one-on-one situation right at the arc. Instead of driving to the basket, he backed off the defender and pulled back to attempt a 3-pointer. And he drained it.

"We were down. I just had a feeling," Williams said with a grin. "I just pulled up, I had confidence in my shot; my feet were set and I knocked it down."

Then he made another trey, getting fouled in the process and converting the free throw to make it a 65-62 game. That got much of the crowd up on its feet, where it stayed for the rest of the game. Baumann credited the atmosphere for helping, saying it was as good as it gets in junior college.

Williams finished with a game-high 32 points, including 8-of-19 from behind the arc. In his last three home games, Williams has 90 points and has shot 22-of-47 from 3-point range.

"There's not very many guys that you feel very good about giving 19 three-point shots to in a game, but he's one of them," Baumann said.

Geron Johnson would score the last basket of regulation to tie the game at 67, and Key's final shot to try and win the game was blocked by Silas Mills, who hucked the ball downcourt to Williams, who couldn't get off a quality shot at the buzzer.

So for the second time in as many games, Garden City went to overtime.

Porter was fouled making a layup for a three-point play to start overtime, but Key mirrored the feat right afterwards. Two Williams free throws made it 77-73 with 13.6 seconds to play in the period, but Julian Rose got Barton to within two. Garden City just needed to inbound the ball to salt the game away, with 4.6 seconds on the clock. Instead, they turned it over and Turon Parker tied the game at 77 with a jumper in the lane with 0.5 seconds left on the clock.

The Busters would hold on through the second overtime and the Cougars threw the ball out of bounds trying to get a last shot off to force a third extra period, finally giving Garden City the win.

Porter had eight points in the two overtimes, and finished with 12 points and 12 rebounds.

"We persevered through a lot," he said. "Going through double-overtime, it's going to help us in the season down the road."

Still, the scoring droughts and lapses on defense that plagued the Busters during their three-game losing streak reappeared on Saturday and against a team like Barton, looked like they would doom Garden City to another loss at home.

"We just gave them the game at times," Baumann said. "That's the thing about us, that's the Jekyll and Hyde, we just gave the game away. We just stopped playing defense, we stopped rebounding. Every time they shot a free throw, we couldn't get the rebound."

Baumann added that while he pointed out a lot of negatives, he was happy that the Busters fought back to get a much-needed win.

Garden City returns to action on Wednesday with an 8 p.m. game at Colby, which has an identical record to the Busters, in both league play and overall.

The lapses on offense and defense and the inconsistency though, will have to disappear for good, Baumann said, for Garden City to make a late-season push.

"Those things have got to stop happening," he said. "You can't win big games consistently when you have those kind of errors in the game."

See boxscore in Scoreboard, Page B2.

Welcome!    

Today's events • Weekly Events

Submit An Event