Guelph Mercury: Deep Gaels Clip Crusaders

Retrieved from: http://news.guelphmercury.com/Sports/article/579528

Writer: Rob Massey
January 5/10

GUELPH — The Guelph CVI Green Gaels might be the quick-change artists of the District 10 high school senior boys’ basketball league.

The Gaels like to get all of their bench into the action to take advantage of their depth. The result is that very little time goes by without the horn being sounded and the Gaels making a change.

“We feel our team depth-wise, it shouldn’t matter who’s on the court, we should have the same level of play,” Guelph CVI coach Jonathan Jones said. “We rotate a lot. This game, we had some foul trouble so we had more guys in than normal, but we feel comfortable that we can get the majority of our guys in.”

Tuesday on their home court, the Gaels received points from eight players in a 74-53 victory over the Lourdes Crusaders.

Norman Yamini led the Gaels with 19 points while Jon Warnholtz had 16 and Brad Evans added 15. Gasim Mohamed-Salin collected seven.

Mike Finoro connected for a game-high 21 points for Lourdes while Sharieff Peru had 12 and Alex Pellegrino netted nine. The Crusaders collected 21 points on foul shots while the Gaels had seven.

Spreading the scoring around is the norm for the Gaels.

“We don’t have one big-time scorer on our team,” Jones said. “We have a lot of guys that on any given day, they can lead the team in scoring. We have a balanced attack.”

The Gaels also like to everything at a quick pace. They move the ball up the court in a hurry and they look to use the fast break as much as possible. When Lourdes cut the gap to single digits early in the fourth quarter Tuesday, the hosts pulled away with several points off the fast break. The more the Crusaders had to press, the more it made them vulnerable for the fast break.

“We have this new mentality where we’re going to try to push the tempo,” Jones said. “We’ve got to work on the whole controlled fast breaks and controlling where we’re going.”

The win lifts the Gaels to 3-6. They’re in sixth place while the Crusaders are fifth at 4-5.