Team Effort to a T
MC’s Men’s Basketball teams always construct, then utilize deeply talented rosters, and this matchup was the gold standard for not just the Raptors, but any successful basketball team.  The Raptors scored 102 points with no player scoring a quarter or more of the total. Despite having the personnel for it, there’s no isolation action (with the exception of obvious mismatches) in their offense either, given 26 of their 40 made field goals came off an assist; MC’s ball movement was on full display. Plenty of these assists were made possible by MC’s hounding defense and ability to push the tempo in transition with as many as four players active in the passing lanes at once, resulting in 15 steals and 29 points off turnovers. This high-energy play on both ends of the floor resulted in an uncanny 61.5 team field goal percentage.

15-5-5

Five Raptors ended with double digits in the scoring column across three starters and two reserves; head coach Quieonn Blackman rolled 11 players out, and nine of them scored at least one or more field goals. Most notably, however, were the four players who embodied MC’s balanced system and notched a stat line of 15, 5, and 5 in three different ways.

Chris Levy – 19 points,  5 rebounds, 6 assists.

Levy’s been having himself a month this February, averaging 18 points and nearly 5 assists on a ridiculous 81.5 percent True Shooting (TS). His matchup against Harford was also hyper efficient, as he scored his 19 points with just one missed shot and free throw, while also generating a ton of points in transition through a mirage of deflections resulting in three steals and fastbreak buckets.

Isaiah Renaud – 16 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists

Coming off the bench, Renaud notched an efficient 16-5-5 in just 24 minutes of action. He shot 6/9 from the field, with one of those field goals being an emphatic reverse jam off an alley-oop pass. This dunk not only concluded the first half, but was a statement toward the Owls who’d started an altercation with Renaud that resulted in a technical foul for Harford just minutes prior.

Ian Pascal – 24 points, 5 assists, 5 steals

Pascal was everywhere, and he only needed 30 minutes to lead the game in both points and steals. Pascal came into the game hot, scoring a career-high 37 points in their previous away matchup versus the Washington Adventist University Shock. He, too, had an efficient night on the floor, shooting 9/14 from the field and 7/7 from the free throw line. He had an incredibly active outing on the other side of the ball with eight steals and blocks (stocks), adding three blocks to his statline alongside those five steals. On any other night, eight stocks would put a player considerably ahead of anyone else in that category, but center and The Advocate’s player of the game, Jordan Emecheta, put up career-highs across the board.

Jordan Emecheta – 21 points, 5 rebounds, 6 blocks, 3 steals

Emecheta’s been a defensive anchor all winter, using his six-foot-nine frame and innate jumping ability to average just shy of three blocks per game for the Raptors in his freshman season. He was the X-factor of this game, recording all six of his blocks in just the first half, in which he played 16 minutes and 19 seconds of. Six blocks in sixteen minutes sends a message, that message being: “Stop driving while I’m on the floor,” and the reason he didn’t record any more blocks in the second half is because the Owls listened. The Owls attempted 75 percent of their three-point attempts in the second half after the big man’s enforcing first half, limiting the surface area they could score from. On the other end of the floor, Emecheta was running, filling lanes, and finishing plays, scoring 18 of his season-high 21 points in the paint.