by Keith Peters
The best weapon on the Palo Alto boys' basketball team doesn't have a name but always shows up in the box score. It doesn't breathe, yet it eats opposing team alive. You can't pat it on the back for a job well done, or quote it. And it can only be done with five players.
Feel trapped for an answer? So does the opposition when the Vikings employ their trapping defense, the kind Westmont got caught in last weekend when the Warriors saw a nine-point lead turn into a 10-point deficit in the Central Coast Section Division III championship game.
By the time Palo Alto had swarmed and trapped and scrapped and clawed its way back from the dead, the Vikings had themselves a not-too-pretty 38-28 victory that had Paly coaching Jim Forthoffer exclaiming: "What a weird game."
Weird, indeed. Palo Alto took 14 three-point attempts in the game and missed them all. The Vikings took 10 shots in the second quarter and fired blanks. This from a team that averaged 86 points in its first two CCS playoff games.
Palo Alto, however, pulled it off and escaped into the Northern California playoffs that got underway Tuesday night. The Vikings (22-6), the No. 2 seed in Division III, took on No. 7 Foothill of Redding (11-12) in their opener and needed a victory to advance to Round 2 Thursday--another home game (7 p.m.) against the winner of No. 2 Grant (28-2) of Sacramento and No. 6 El Molino (23-9) of Forestville.
Two victories will put Paly into the NorCal championship game Saturday at the Oakland Coliseum Arena at 1:15 p.m.
That's a lot of ground to cover, especially considering that standout senior center Evan Peterson was involved in a car accident Sunday (the car he was in was rear-ended and he suffered a sore back) and senior guard Matt Sizemore was still battling the flu.
The health of Peterson and Sizemore is of the utmost importance to the Vikings' defensive effort, which limited Westmont to just four points in the fourth quarter and 11 in the second half of Saturday's game at the San Jose State Event Center. The Warriors were forced into 12 costly turnovers the final two quarters.
"We did pick up our defense in the second half," said Forthoffer, who explained that his players used three different trapping defenses "so they (Westmont) wouldn't know what to expect."
Forthoffer declined to use a similar press at the beginning of the game for the simple reason that "We've got to pick our spots when we can go full energy."
Well, the second half was as good a time as ever. The Vikings had just gone zero from 10 from the field (no points) in the second quarter and trailed 17-10. During halftime, Forthoffer told his players in no uneasy terms that a loss to Westmont meant a long bus ride in the first round of the NorCal playoffs.
That was all the convincing the Vikings needed.
"The pressure was the key to the game," said Paly junior Bruce Powell, whose 10 points and defense was the spark that ignited the Vikings after Westmont had grabbed a 24-15 lead with 3:00 left in the third quarter. From that point on, Paly outscored the Warriors, 23-4.
Powell's ballhawking defense led to back-to-back layins before he was fouled on a drive and made both free throws to send the Vikings into the fourth quarter with only three points (24-21) to make up.
Paly opened the final period with consecutive layins by Errol Johnson and Peterson, the latter at 7:10 to give the Vikings the lead for good at 25-24. Peterson finished with eight points and 12 rebounds, while Johnson accumulated 10 points, five rebounds, five assists, three steals and a crucial talk with Powell, who picked up his fourth foul with 5:25 to play.
"I just told Bruce that we didn't have to foul," Johnson said. "We just had to play defense."
And that the Vikings did. Westmont's 6-foot-6 center Matt Tait, who scored eight points in the first half, went scoreless after that. And 6-5 David Newberg, who averaged more than 20 points a game during the regular season, didn't get his first field goal until just 11 seconds remained.
With that done, the Vikings rejoiced. They had the school's second CCS basketball crown since '93 and Paly's sixth section hoop title since 1910.
That's joining some pretty elite company.
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