Usually if a team doesn’t score a point in the fourth quarter it has zero chance of winning. That wasn’t the case for the Durango High School boys basketball team Friday.

The Demons (1-1) dropped to the loser’s bracket of the Shiprock Tournament after a loss to Bloomfield on Thursday. Awaiting Durango on Friday was Newcomb, a small Class 3A school from San Juan County, New Mexico. Durango had no problem taking a 62-18 victory for its first win of the season.

The Demons built a 30-7 lead after one quarter and pushed it to 47-11 at halftime. The Demons outscored the Skyhawks 15-5 in the third quarter before both teams threw in the towel in the fourth quarter, as Newcomb (2-3) won the final 8 minutes 2-0.

“We just let our talent overwhelm them with our press early,” DHS head coach Alan Batiste said in a phone interview with The Durango Herald. “It impacted them big time, and they turned it over. We capitalized on that.”

Terrence Trujillo nearly outscored Newcomb alone. He finished with 17 points on 7-of-8 shooting, including a perfect 2-for-2 from behind the 3-point line.

Orion Clay also had a big game. He finished with 16 points on 6-of-9 shooting. He also had four steals and three rebounds. He tied for the team-high in rebounds with Seth Gilleland.

Kyle Kirkpatrick had a team-high three assists for the Demons, who will face Aztec at 11:30 a.m. Saturday to finish the tournament. “It was one of those games where we worked on our execution and things that will help us down the road,” Batiste said. “It was a shocker we didn’t score in the fourth quarter, but we had some guys in there who needed to build confidence and work on some things. We were executing instead of working on scoring. We only got like four or five shots up that quarter.”

jlivingston@durangoherald.com