Telluride looked like it might give the Ignacio High School boys basketball team a tight game for the first time this San Juan League season Saturday in Ignacio.
The Miners had narrowed a double-digit deficit to six with 2 minutes, 37 seconds left in the third quarter.
Then junior guard Wyatt Hayes stepped back onto the floor after sitting down with three fouls. He immediately canned a 3-pointer, snatched two steals and hit a layup to extend the margin back over 10.
“Just trying to get our team going, get points and get the lead back,” said Hayes, son of Cindy and Tim Hayes. “Get a big lead.”
That broke the Miners for good, and IHS held on for a 56-32 win.
Hayes was at the center of the action all night, finishing with seven points, six steals and six assists.
“He’s got quickness, he has ball-handling, and he demands a lot of attention,” IHS head coach Chris Valdez said. “They’re double-teaming him, or if we go to the post, they won’t double team off of him, which gives us one-on-one opportunities.”
Senior Adison Jones provided his usual steady presence inside for the Bobcats.
He scored a game-high 22 points and grabbed six rebounds.
“I try and score if I have one-on-one,” said Jones, son of Greg Jones and Latisha Taylor. “If I get double-teamed then I’m looking to kick out to a wide-open shooter.”
IHS (8-2, 4-0 SJL) held a double-digit lead for most of the game outside of two stretches when the Miners ignited from beyond the arc.
“We were being patient at that time, really had attention to detail,” said Telluride head coach Stefan Reiter. “Reading and reacting like we were supposed to. Then we have lapses, and the deficit gets expanded again.”
Telluride hit four consecutive 3-pointers at the end of the second half to cut its deficit to 22-16.
IHS struggled fighting through screens, and the Miners hit the open shots they took.
“They were setting a lot of picks, and we weren’t talking, and they were hitting wide open shots,” Jones said. “They’re good shooters.”
That followed a dry spell in the first quarter when the Bobcats held Telluride to one field goal by Telluride’s Wilder Hanley.
In fact, the game largely was a dry spell for Tellurdie outside of those two 3-pointer sprees.
“(The first) 13 minutes we held them to two points, then in three minutes, they scored 14 points. That’s a defensive letdown there, and we cannot have that,” Valdez said. “In the second half, we had a 12-point lead again, and we gave them six or eight points and brought it within six again. That was a two minute run. Five minutes of bad basketball cost us close to 20 points.”
Telluride (4-2, 2-0 SJL) is in second place in the league but couldn’t keep up with the Bobcats in their home gym.
IHS closed out the weekend with wins over Mancos, which Valdez thought was the best team in the league outside of IHS, and Telluride, second in the standings.
The Bobcats now will play their next five games on the road, including four in conference and the Pine River Rivalry against Bayfield before they return home.
“It puts us at No. 1 in the league, one game ahead of both those teams, then one of them will beat the other, which will give us a two-game lead on one of them,” Valdez said. “We’ve never seen Telluride play with this new team. Now we’ve seen what they can do, we can study them and we can change our defense accordingly to help us.”
kgrabowski@durangoherald.com
