BANGOR – From the start of Saturday night’s final Eastern Class A quarterfinal, Brewer’s shots were finding the bottom of the net at an alarming rate.
The 13th-seeded Witches shot 66 percent for the game and never trailed on their way to a 54-46 win over No. 12 Leavitt at the Bangor Auditorium.
Brewer will face No. 9 Hampden Academy in the semifinals next Friday night. Leavitt finishes the season 10-10, having made the only trip to Bangor in school history and going deeper in the tournament than it has in at least 30 years.
“I guess (shooting 66 percent) is kind of going against what’s been going on in the tournament,” said Brewer coach Mark Reed. “Somebody told me before the game started our team couldn’t shoot any worse than the other teams that played today, so I figured that was a good thing.”
Chris Wilson led Brewer with 21 points, six rebounds and four assists, while Isaac Bell added 14 points. Jon Pirruccello paced the Hornets with 14 points and 10 rebounds and Brandon Powell added 13 points.
“We knew going in that everything for them went through Chris Wilson,” said Leavitt coach Mike Remillard. “They would set seven, eight, nine, 10 screens just to get him free. We tried initially to go with our zone much like we did against (Lewiston’s) David Labonte (in the prelims) and try to frustrate him, but big players have a way of coming up in big games, and Chris just played a beautiful ballgame.”
Early tournament jitters often cause teams to sputter out of the gates, but Brewer played crisp and clean basketball from the get-go. The Witches (11-9) collected five assists off their first six baskets and jumped out to a 14-5 lead.
Led by a pair of Dan Berry buckets, the Hornets got back into the thick of it with an 8-0 run. Brewer’s passing prowess continued, however, resulting in 12-of-19 shooting from the field for the first half. A buzzer-beating layup by Ben Davis off a Wilson steal widened the lead back to nine, 26-17, at halftime.
“We didn’t hit shots that we needed to hit,” said Remillard, whose team shot a respectable 44 percent. “A lot of shots tonight either rimmed out or rolled out or just plain didn’t hit rim.”
A three-point play by Powell and a steal and layup by Nate Cousineau whittled the deficit back down to four early in the third quarter, and Wilson went scoreless for the first five-and-a-half minutes. The junior guard remained dormant for much of the period, then came alive with a pair of hoops late, the second of which gave the Witches an 11-point lead heading into the final quarter.
Leavitt refused to go away in the fourth, but the Hornets never made serious headway, either. A Powell trey two minutes in made it 40-34, but that was as close as they would get.
Comments are no longer available on this story