By Brennan Stebbins (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
After a 29-point loss to Kickapoo last week, the Joplin boys basketball team was in need of a big win.
And the loser of Monday’s Central Ozarks Conference showdown at Carthage would have a losing record in COC play.
In the end, it was the Eagles who prevailed – thanks to a tip-in by junior forward Terrance Gibson with six seconds on the clock that gave Joplin a hard earned 46-45 road win.
“After last week, the Kickapoo game, yeah I thought it was a good bounce back,” Joplin coach Bronson Schaake said. “We talk about February’s kind of make or break time, what you want to be. And our district is loaded and we need to find a way to win games like that.”
Joplin (14-5, 2-1) never trailed in the second half until Carthage’s Clay Kinder made a three pointer with 2:21 remaining to make it 43-41. He added two free throws a minute later to make it 45-44. The Eagles held the ball nearly every second after that.
Joplin grabbed two offensive rebounds to keep possession and then Always Wright put up a driving jump shot in the waning seconds. Gibson tipped in the miss for the lead and Carthage’s frantic dash down the court resulted in a turnover at the baseline with a tenth of a second remaining.
“Get to the rim,” Schaake said of the final sequence. “You can draw up a play all you want but you’ve got to let your dudes go do it. I thought they were going to start fouling because they only had four team fouls so I said it has to be quick and I said if we’re going to hold for the last shot let’s do it.”
“I trust those guys, especially the Wrights, with the ball,” Schaake said. “If they feel like they can do that, let’s do it. You’ve got to put trust in your players.”
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“I told our guys that’s the first true gut punch of the season for this group,” Carthage coach Nathan Morris said. “They’ve wanted this one for numerous reasons and I thought our guys battled and played extremely hard and did what we asked them to do with our scouting report and what our game plan was. We stuck to it and I thought they did a heck of a job. What we asked them to do was not something we normally do and they bought in. They did what was necessary. A couple late big rebounds, a couple late breaks that didn’t roll our way. That one hurts.”
Carthage (15-4, 1-2) took an early 13-7 lead in the first quarter – the largest lead of the game – and still led by five early in the second before Joplin used an 8-2 run to pull ahead. The Eagles led 24-23 at halftime. Twice in the second half Joplin took leads of five points but could never put Carthage away.
It was 34-32 early in the fourth when Always Wright made a three pointer to extend it to 5. He scored seven straight points for the Eagles, but Carthage sharpshooter Joel Pugh countered with six points in a minute-and-a-half to keep it close.
“I felt like we let their pressure really affect us early in the game,” Morris said. “I think if we would have finished on the offensive end a little earlier in the game that could have been a different outcome. I think we had three or four great looks in the first quarter that didn’t fall. That’s a little different ballgame if we jump out to a six, seven-point lead.”
Gibson finished as Joplin’s leading scorer with 16 points and Always Wright added 13. Quin Renfro scored 9.
Kinder led Carthage with 17 points, while Justin Ray, Max Templeman and Pugh each scored 8.
