Pelham boys basketball returns to D3 final with win over Hopkinton (video)

MANCHESTER – The Pelham High School boys basketball team expected to see something unique defensively Wednesday night when it faced Hopkinton in the Division III semifinals.

The Pythons were right, as the Hawks pulled out a diamond-and-one defense to try to slow down Pelham senior Keith Brown.

While the defense worked at times, it didn’t work enough, and when it was, No. 5 Hopkinton struggled at the other end. The result was a 57-42 win for No. 1 Pelham, as the defending champions advanced to the title game, where they will face No. 3 Kearsarge on Saturday.

Brown finished with 29 points on 10 of 15 shooting from the field, including 4 of 8 from behind the 3-point line, and was also 5 of 7 from the free throw line. Brown also had a game-high seven rebounds, dished out three assists and had two steals.

“They’ve got a pretty good player,” Hopkinton coach David Chase said. “These kids executed the game plan pretty well and he shot the heck out of it. What can you do? We put a smaller, quicker guy on him and he posted him up. All I can say is how proud I am of how hard we played. We didn’t embarrass ourselves.”

Cam Deloreto added nine points and six rebounds for Pelham (20-1) while Ryan Nystrom added six points and Kyle Frank had four points, five boards and three assists.

“We knew (Chase) would come up with a defense with a couple of days to practice,” Pelham coach Matt Regan said. “We’ve only seen box-and-one all year, so the diamond kind of threw off our box offense.

“We’ve got to be better with our screens in certain spots of the floor. Just because they’re in a different alignment doesn’t mean that the offense changes, it just means you’ve got to be in a different spot on the floor. I thought we struggled with that. Each time they went man-to-man, we did a nice job to put the ball in the basket.”

It helped that Pelham was able to storm out to a 10-0 lead just 1:44 into the game, with Brown hitting two 3s, the second of which came from well behind the line.

“It’s always great to get up early, because when you’re the higher ranked team, if it goes the other way, you kind of give the other team belief early on,” Regan said. “I thought that start got us off on the right foot.”

Hopkinton (16-5) was able to regroup in the first quarter, but scored just six points in the second and trailed by 14 at halftime.

“We went a very long time in that second quarter without scoring,” Chase said. “If we had hit a couple of shots and kept it within six or eight, it might have been a different story. Maybe on the perfect night, we have the perfect storm and we get them.”

Cam Cyr led the Hawks with 10 points while Jacob Rockwood added eight points and four rebounds and Nick Meserv chipped in with seven points and five boards. Robert Wilkerson also had seven for Hopkinton, which lost by 19 points to Pelham during the regular season.

A 3-pointer by Brown early in the third quarter put Pelham up 35-18, but Hopkinton answered quickly on a jumper by Cyr, starting the Hawks on a 12-2 run that cut the lead to seven points.

Cyr had eight points during that stretch as Hopkinton got it to 37-30 in the final minute of the third, but a basket by Deloreto with 33 seconds left made it a nine-point game going into the third quarter.

“I just told them to relax,” Regan said. “I felt like we kind of did that. We weren’t playing within ourselves for about a three-minute stretch there. I thought we’d be able to fight through it and when we didn’t, we had to call the timeout and regroup. Defensively, I thought we were pretty good the rest of the way.”

Pelham pushed the lead back to 11 points early in the fourth, but Hopkinton again cut it to seven, 47-40, with 3:07 left to play. The Hawks started fouling the Pythons soon after that and Pelham went 6 of 10 from the line down the stretch.

“I couldn’t be prouder of how hard we worked,” Chase said. “We had only five returning guys who played with the program. We keep working on our offensive skills in the offseason, we’ve got a lot of kids returning. That was our big thing about getting here and having that experience of seeing what it’s like to be down here.”