We take one last look at the 2014-15 high school basketball season.
 
Lingering thoughts from the four championship games…..

When the 2013-14 basketball season was about to begin the truth was Wilton-Lyndeborough hadn’t been relevant in years. Sean Young had taken the school to the 2008 Class S championship game (the first year of NHsportspage) where they were soundly beaten by Buddy Trask’s 21-1 Colebrook team.

Since that time there had been teams that failed to live up to expectations and Young had moved on. The southern team’s hierarchy was Newmarket, Moultonborough and everyone else. Wilton-Lyndeborough was sort of an afterthought to be honest..

That’s what made it all the more intriguing when word started spreading about some football player from Texas. He was supposed to play for Bishop Guertin, but was in fact going to go to Wilton-Lyndeborough (WLC). Where they have no football team.

As the pre-season started people at our jamboree started telling me about that football player who also happened to be a pretty good basketball player, and that WLC was going to be factor again.

 Now…you hear about kids like this all the time, happened again this pre-season with a player in Division III who went on to average 5 points a game. Sean Young himself, coming out of a jamboree Epping played in, told me how good this ‘Litts’ kid was.

 Sean knows the game and is one of the best coaches in the state at pre-game & in-game adjustments but Sean would today describe me as ‘A beast in the low post who can use both hands at will and dominates his man in one on one situations!’ when in reality I’m 43, can’t jump and my lower back is killing me five minutes into any game. So Sean Young can draw up an out of bounds play for me any day but he’s not selling me a car. He wasn’t selling me Jordan Litts either.

Then the real games began.

Jordan Litts was a football player after all. You look at him and you see a free safety knocking down receivers over the middle and sticking running backs at the line. He even dribbles the ball like a running back looking for his seam to open in front of him. ‘The Litts kid’ started putting up staggering numbers (he would score 1,000 points in only two seasons) but there wasn’t much around him. In games against Sunapee he was helpless to match up against a team that started four all-state players. When the tournament seeds came out Jordan Litts from Texas was going to Colebrook, NH.

 Not only was Colebrook 2,000 miles from Texas it was a different world entirely. Litts was going to have to be on a bus with his teammates for four hours and win in a gym with a 15 foot Mohawk Indian on the wall and one of the winningest coaches in New Hampshire history down the sideline.

 41 points later Litts walked out of Colebrook and into Division IV lore. His name would now come up at The Swamp in Colebrook for a very long time even if Litts didn’t know where that was or that it had nothing to do with an actual swamp.

When 2014 began Litts now had his running mates and again…there was more ‘did you hear and did you see?’ coming out of Wilton. Trey & Ty Carrier came aboard from catholic school and Nashua North head coach Steve Lane had his son Casey enrolled as a freshman, and from all reports, all three could play.

The chemistry didn’t happen overnight, it never does in basketball and that’s what people who see the NBA as a ‘the best player wins’ league never seem to grasp. This was a good team early, a better team in February and the best team in Division IV in March. Yet with under a minute to go in the championship game at Plymouth State Litts was about to fall one game short. That’s about the time he went from Jordan Litts former football player from Texas to Jordan Litts from Wilton, New Hampshire.

 He buried back to back three’s and with Epping advancing down the floor for a second consecutive title he stripped the Blue Devils point guard, out raced the nearest defender trying to foul him and blew into the open court for the game sealing lay-up. 1,600 watched it happen and half seemed to fall back into stunned silence while the other half seemed to be on the floor with him within minutes.

 It was a fitting end after the way it all began. People will be talking about that ‘Litts kid’ for a very long time but it won’t be about what they’ve heard about him..it will be about what they saw him do.

 I spend as much time during the season on the phone with Pelham head coach Matt Regan as any coach in the state. If he has a favorite player on his team I haven’t gotten it out of him yet. He loves his kids but never lets on about which one might be the one he appreciates the most.

 Ryan Rondeau has fit in from day one, Keith Brown is the worker, Ryan Cloutier is the nicest kid you’ll ever meet…on & on. There is one kid though who seems to come up more than any other, and maybe because it is the kid Regan sent home as a freshman.

 Pelham as a program, going back to the days athletic director Todd Kress was their head coach, has made trips to the Final Four a near annual event. When you have that kind of success more kids want to be involved and that means more kids have to be sent home.

 Four years ago Regan cut Dylan Silvestri and why wouldn’t he? Silvestri isn’t fast, he isn’t that big and even in a pick-up game you’re not going to notice anything about Silvestri in particular. Except that his team is usually always going to win.

 You see every great band (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, U2..Whitesnake, Ratt) has their lead singer and lead guitarist. Those are the guys on the album cover and the t-shirts. But you need the drummer to set the beat and the bassist to keep it in line. They fade behind the lead guys even on stage but the sound is off without them.

 Cloutier and Brown are your lead guys. Dylan Silvestri is the drummer.

 Silvestri gets the rebounds, he sets the screens, he pushes around the player who is getting too deep into the paint and he’s the kind of kid who suffered a gruesome finger injury mid-game and just pushes it back in and plays (that happened).

 When Pelham plays bigger Massachusetts teams in the off-season it’s Silvestri who has to bang down low with some 6’6 big guy who out-weighs him by 60 lbs. He never complains, he never makes excuses and he never backs down.

Matt Regan see’s it every day and never fails to mention it, probably because he didn’t see it at first four years ago.
 So it was only fitting that in the last game of his high school career it wasn’t Brown, Cloutier or even Rondeau who scored 10 first quarter points against Conant in front of nearly 2,000 people it was the guy doing the dirty work.

 The two biggest plays of the championship game were Keith Brown drilling a three after a long possession to edge the Pelham lead back to four and an offensive rebound off of a missed Cloutier foul shot about a minute later by Silvestri that kept Conant from getting the ball back down only 5 points with 1:30 left. Brown’s big play was the three pointer that the entire gym saw and Silvestri’s was a hustle play followed by a quick and timely timeout by his head coach.

 One play got a standing ovation, the other maybe a sigh of relief.

 Seems fitting..

You can’t win without guys like Dylan Silvestri. The world is full of guys in bars who will tell you they never played varsity basketball because ‘The coach was an idiot.’ Dylan Silvestri could have been one of those guys..instead when they ask him where he played he’ll say, ‘I played at Pelham…..and we never lost a game my senior year.’

Jourdain Bell didn’t know exactly where he would spend his senior year, and who was he going to be playing for?
As late as into the fall Bishop Brady was still trying to hire a basketball coach after Mark Yeaton stepped down the year before. Some likely names had already taken other jobs. Was Matt Alosa in the mix? Corey Hassan? Would Dave Keefe really leave Trinity and coach Bishop Brady?

 None of those rumors panned out and when the process was over Cole Etten, a former standout at Hollis-Brookline and their JV coach, would take over as the youngest coach in the state. That was the good news. The incredibly good news? Jourdain and Joe Bell were leaving the prep school they had been enrolled in all fall to come back. Cole Etten had a terrific new job….and a ton of pressure on him to win it all in year one.

 Brady had moments early on where they looked the part of the pre-season favorite (a Holiday tournament win over Pembroke) and times where they looked inconsistent or undisciplined ( a loss to Merrimack Valley in which they couldn’t hold a late lead) but the Giants never worried about seeding and tried to get better by the day.

 When the tournament started Brady benefited from Manchester West (a team that had beaten a shorthanded Brady team) losing in the first round. The Giants cruised all the way to the Saturday final where it was Jim Mulvey & Portsmouth waiting. The 24 year old coach who nobody thought would get the job paired with a team led by a point guard who had never gotten to Durham in his first three years as an all-state performer.

Brady led twice the entire game: 27-26 and when Joe Bell hit a lay-up with four seconds left off of a steal from Brendan Johnson and a feed from Aaron Svendsen.
 Jourdain Bell had carried his team to this moment with back to back three pointers to tie the score and in the final play of the season he was one of the only players on his team never to touch the ball.

 Brady didn’t win on a fluke play or by accident. After picking up his fourth foul mid-way through the fourth quarter Jim Mulvey knew Bell wouldn’t want to drive to the hoop to draw a fifth foul and disqualification so he told his kids to get up on Bell and force him to drive.

 The young Clippers though didn’t heed the advice and allowed Bell to get two wide open looks from three. As Portsmouth missed lay-ups and free throws Brady converted every time they had to and when the game was there to be taken they took it. Cole Etten identified & adjusted his team to Portsmouth’s match-up zone and Bell became the fourth player of the year winner to also take home the division title.

 Just as Jordan Litts had in Plymouth Jourdain Bell owned the moment. Bishop Brady now also owns the Division II title.

 When I went into the Coe-Brown locker room to talk to longtime head coach David Smith he thanked me before the game for the opportunity to play in our Coaches for a Cause Jamboree against Londonderry.

 At halftime down by 25 points, he looked at me like he was wondering what he had done to upset me.

 That was the night we first started to see what this Lancers team could be. The skinny junior point guard who had all the intangibles was now a polished senior who had spent a lot of his free time in either a gym or a weight room. Evidenced by the fact St Anselms head coach Keith Dickson was there watching him.

 Head coach Nate Stanton, in only his second year on the job, knew he had taken over a program with talent. Jeff Gustavson, the Lancers former head coach, had done a great job building a good program that would keep the kids accountable. The results were now showing on the floor.

 Stanton brought in his own style of play & tempo and his kids reacted very well to it from the start. The move from one coach to the other had not been a smooth one in some circles but the kids were moving forward and playing as a team. The rest wasn’t going to affect them on the floor.

 All Nate Stanton was interested in doing was coaching his kids. All the kid wanted to do was play for him now that he was their coach. Londonderry’s team stuck together and a strong bond was formed.

 Londonderry rolled over Coe-Brown that night and continued on that way for the better part of three months. They squared off with Pinkerton across town and won. They traveled into Manchester to face the undefeated champs and won. They went out to McIsaac country and buried Spaulding with a flurry of three pointers. Merrimack slowed the tempo and made Londonderry beat them at their 35 MPH speed limit pace and Memorial had a shot to knock them from the unbeaten but the Lancers never lost.

 When it came to the final 9 seconds of the 2015 season a great offensive team made a great defensive adjustment. With all-state point guard Geo Baker flying up the court the Lancers forced him left and sealed him off so that he couldn’t get to the rim.  Baker made the only pass he could, back out to his all-state backcourt mate Matt Rizzo. The Lancers rotated defensively and forced Rizzo, who saw the season literally ticking away, to pump fake not once but twice…crucial seconds going away with each move.

 Rizzo’s final hurried shot hit the side of the rim as time expired and Londonderry was a state champion in boys’ basketball for the first time in school history.

 The pig pile at half court contained 12 guys in white & blue jerseys and a guy in slacks. Nate Stanton had been through a lot in two short years and he wasn’t going the route of the simple fist pound and handshake. He got in the mix with the team and jumped around the floor at UNH.

 His team.
 
The 12 seniors I’d send to represent the state of New Hampshire against Vermont………..

 Bill Simmons yearns to be an NBA GM, I yearn to be put in charge of naming the Shrine Team. The selection process has been called a mess the last few seasons but little change has been made. We covered last year’s game as McIsaac & I even made an emergency fruit run for the boys before the game (I can still see Eli Hodgson chewing an orange in lay-up line…) yet the call to be involved in the process never comes…

Oh well… here are the 12 I’d send to get our second win in a row against our neighbors to the west.

 My coaching staff this year: Head coach: Jim Mulvey (Portsmouth), Asst.: Eric Saucier (Conant) & Trevor Howard (Littleton)..those should be the next three head coaches in order…Tim Cronin (Spaulding) after that…see how well this could be planned…

The Starters

Center: Dominic Timbas of Pembroke

Yes I’m starting Pembroke’s point guard as New Hampshire’s center, welcome to 2015. Players can’t play with their backs to basket anymore so we have 6’5 centers taking the ball up the floor. Timbas can guard the low post, can get out in transition and he has been coached by Matt Alosa for four years. He knows the game.

Power forward: Joey Martin of Manchester Central

You can put Joey Martin anywhere on the floor and your team is immediately better. He can guard bigs and get out on the perimeter. Easy call here.

Small forward: Darian Berry of Spaulding

 Is Berry underrated? Only if you don’t listen to WTSN…..Berry is a scorer, floor general and an elite defender. We’re in good hands here.

Point guard: Jourdain Bell of Bishop Brady

 This much talent around Bell is like a kid in a candy store or Pete Tarrier at a Bubble Hockey Tournament.

Shooting guard: Cody Ball of Londonderry

 I mean have you looked at this backcourt???
 
 The reserves

 Ryan Cloutier of Pelham

 Cloutier may be 6’5 but he is a perimeter player. Great in transition and underrated defensively with his ability to get a hand in your face. Also he is the best dunker in the state and McIsaac and I want to yell & scream about dunks this summer.

 Marc Corey of Londonderry

 Another 6’5 perimeter threat. Smart basketball player and this game is about the ability to knock down shots. Corey knocks down shots.

 Kabongo Ngalakulondi of Manchester Memorial

 Instant offense off the bench. He is a match-up nightmare for the other team.

 Jordan Litts of Wilton-Lyndeborough

 Another point guard to pair with Berry, Ball or Martin on the wings. Litts is also an elite defender so I can put him on that Vermont point guard that starts knocking down jumpers.

 Mike Osgood of Nashua South

 Great big man to come off the bench as he and Timbas are inter-changeable.

 Zach Jones of Manchester West

 One of the best finishers on the team, also an elite defender…this team is going to be very good defensively, I know this because I’ve said elite defender about three times already…enough defense I need a shooter…just a gunslinger off the bench.

 Jared Stauffeneker of Mascenic Regional

 Perfect. When we have lost this game in recent years it’s because no one can knock down shots…I’m bringing in Mr. Stauffeneker to do exactly that.

 Coming Friday: Part II where I discuss AAU & recruiting and my final 2014 thoughts.