PORTALES — Portales’ boys basketball team is 4A, Carlsbad’s 5A. But they both see benefits in playing each other.
Especially the Cavemen, who won Tuesday night’s game 52-40 at Portales High’s Ram Athletic Center and snapped a three-game losing skid.
“It’s a quality win,” Carlsbad head coach Steve Garza said. “A smaller classification but Portales is always solid in basketball. We wish them luck the rest of the year, but I’m just proud of our boys for sticking it out and extending the lead.”
“It’s great,” Portales head coach Rickie McBroom said of playing up a classification rung. “I thought we competed extremely well with them. They’re huge. That’s something that we have to deal with every time we step on the court because everybody we’ve played this year has been bigger than us.”
Carlsbad led Tuesday’s game 11-8 after one quarter, 26-17 at halftime. The Cavemen opened the second half strong and quickly increased their lead to 33-17, thanks to five points from Evan Sullivan and two from Shamar Smith.
“We talked at halftime about a few adjustments we were going to make,” Garza said, “and we extended it at the beginning of the third quarter. I would’ve loved to put it on cruise control but man, it’s Portales.”
And the Rams did come back with an 11-0 third-quarter run that included two Kenevan Bailey free throws, a Dason Davis basket driving through traffic, a left-arc trey from Bailey, a three-point play completed at the line by Hagen Rains, and a Philip Blidi free throw. Just like that Portales was within 33-28 with less than a minute to play in the third.
Squelching the Rams’ momentum was a catch-and-shoot three-pointer hit by Carlsbad’s Damien Perez from the right corner, just before the third-quarter buzzer sounded. So instead of heading into the fourth with just a five-point deficit and momentum, Portales was down 36-28 and a bit stunned by the suddenness of Perez’s shot.
To make things worse for the Rams, they began the fourth quarter by turning the ball over, and the resulting Carlsbad fast break ended with a flip-in by Smith, putting the Cavemen back up by double digits.
It was the start of a 10-3 Carlsbad run in the fourth quarter, a run that had the Cavemen in command 46-31 late in the game. Portales did chip the margin to 48-40, but there was less than a minute left, not much time for a comeback. And Smith closed it out by going 4-for-4 from the line in the last 38 seconds. In all, Smith scored nine of his team-high 17 points in the fourth quarter.
When the victory was official, Carlsbad had improved to 12-6, finally back in the win column after an 11-3 start was followed by three straight losses.
“I thought overall we played a pretty solid game,” Garza said. “I thought we took a couple of quick shots, bad shots, and then we got a little lazy defensively at times. But I’ll tell you what, we hadn’t seen a zone all year and they stayed in a zone all night. … And I thought we did a very good job of executing.”
And even though Portales dropped to 6-11 despite a game-high 18 points from Bailey, McBroom wasn’t disappointed with the Rams’ effort.
“Overall I thought our kids played really hard,” he said. “I think on the whole they played pretty well. We just had little segments where we had a couple of breakdowns on defense or offense. I think we had 10 turnovers in the first half and only four in the second half, so 14 for the game ain’t bad.”