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Boys Basketball: Brian Bennett, Plainfield East escape Minooka
Updated: February 3, 2012 10:29PM
There was a reason visiting Minooka limited Plainfield East to 12 first-half points in Friday night’s Southwest Prairie Conference showdown.
As well as the Indians were playing defensively, it was incumbent on the Bengals to get 6-foot-9 post player Brian Bennett involved on the offensive end.
Bennett scored 10 of his 13 points in a 12-0, third-quarter run that lifted East, which had trailed 18-12 at halftime, into a 30-21 lead, then chipped in three free throws in overtime as the Bengals prevailed 48-41 to take a giant stride toward the conference title.
“We have good shooters from outside, but we were cold from outside and inside in the first half,” Bennett said. “And, I wasn’t touching the ball much. When those things are happening, you have to fight through it. A game against a good team is full of ups and downs.”
East (19-1, 10-0) made 3-of-17 shots the first half, 13-of-23 thereafter. The Bengals, who won at Minooka 54-53 in December, seemingly had the game well in hand, but sharpshooter Jake Hogen had other ideas. The junior guard, who Minooka coach Scott Tanaka said “is turning into a special player,” made the last three of his five 3-pointers with 3:52, 1:32 and 0:14 remaining to tie it at 37.
“Man, they have two guys who can knock it down,” East coach Branden Adkins said, including Ben Heide with Hogen.
East’s Dee Brown missed a layup that could have ended it. But in the overtime, the Bengals forced four turnovers, three on consecutive possessions for Minooka (17-7, 8-2), and Austin Robinson scored five points to help put it away.
“We had great intensity defensively the first half,” Tanaka said. “I’m not sure we had the same intensity, for whatever reason, in the third quarter.”
“We had a lot of energy at the start, and we told the guys to make sure they funneled it in the right direction,” Adkins said. “We got to the basket but didn’t finish the way we usually do. We’d get there but they had the big guys (6-5 Lavell Dean and 6-4 Adam Reynolds) at the rim.
“In the second half, we wanted to go to Brian (Bennett), and their big guys had some foul trouble.”
Bennett, whose eight rebounds helped the Bengals to a 33-22 advantage, said he enjoyed facing the Dean-Reynolds duo. “They’re very physical players, and I think that helps me because a lot of people don’t want to play me physical,” he said. “That’s a motivating factor, plus there’s two of them.”
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