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Titans take down Panthers

By Staff | Dec 27, 2014

NASHUA – If there’s one thing Ricky Oliver doesn’t like, it’s seeing his team score in single digits in a quarter.

On Friday, it happened twice.

Oliver’s Nashua High School North girls basketball team had a hard time scoring against the 2-3 zone in the first half of its game against Nashua South in the first round of the Nashua North Holiday Classic, and was fortunate to have a 10-point lead at halftime. But the Titans made up for it with a dominant, 20-point third quarter to cruise to a 55-23 win on its home floor.

Adaeze Okorie scored 16 points to lead the rout. Sara Cordova hit three of North’s seven 3-pointers in a 13-point effort, while Taylor Choate added nine. The Panthers, on the other hand, shot just 7 for 46 from the field and had no response to the Titans on either end.

“I think we just made the decision that they’re going to play zone and we just going to have to break it,” Oliver said. “I thought the kids played real disciplined with the zone offense we were running. We’re going to face a lot of zone, so we’ve just got to stay disciplined.”

North will play Milford in the semifinals Saturday at 6:30 p.m. South moves to the loser’s bracket to take on Pelham at 3:30 p.m.

The Titans appeared to be on their way to lopsided win from the start after a Choate basket from 3-point range quickly put them up 5-0. However, North got caught trying to work the ball around the perimeter against the zone and its offense went cold as South climbed back into the game to pull to within a point at the end of the first quarter.

That’s when Oliver made adjustments.

Rather than just living on the perimeter, Oliver encouraged his team to work the ball inside and attack the zone. That opened up the floor and created more scoring chances in the paint, as well as allow more shooters to get looks from long range.

“Once we started doing that that’s when it started to break apart,” Oliver said.

The Titans shut out the Panthers to take a 16-6 lead into halftime. But Oliver still wasn’t satisfied with the outcome, and made that perfectly clear to his players.

“I told them, ‘Look, we’ve had two single-digit quarters. That’s not how we play,’ ” he said. “We like to air it up and that’s what we did in the third quarter.”

North responded to Oliver’s frustrations with 39 second-half points, 16 of which were scored by Okorie and Cordova. The pair opened the half with points on consecutive possessions, then Cordova knocked down a 3 to open the floodgates.

Lexi Ivory capped off the run with a 3-pointer as time expired in the third as the Titans took a commanding 36-15 lead into the fourth quarter.

South coach Dan Wyborney said his team’s defensive struggles were a result of its inability to finish on the offensive end. He said had his team made more shots it would have translated to a more emotionally charged defensive showing.

“You can’t win basketball games shooting 7 for 46, so that’s what it really came down to,” he said. “Then what happened was because our offense was struggling, we let it get into our defensive side. We’re usually a very strong defensive unit, and we allowed that to frustrate us and get us down.”

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