4A BOYS: Canyon Springs buries McQueen, moves into final
RENO — Canyon Springs never looked fully comfortable in Friday’s Class 4A state semifinal game against McQueen.
It didn’t matter.
The Pioneers took advantage of 20 Lancers turnovers on the way to a 63-46 win at Lawlor Events Center to advance to the Class 4A boys state title game at 8 p.m. Friday against Bishop Gorman.
“It’s a dream come true,” Pioneers senior center Adrian Snow said. “We’ve been practicing hard to get to this state game.”
Canyon Springs coach Daryl Branham said the setting might have contributed to his team’s slow start.
“I think early on there was a little bit of nerves,” Branham said. “They were playing somewhere that they’d never been before as far as a semifinal state game.”
Snow said he wasn’t sure if it was nerves, but he knew something was off about his team on Thursday.
“I don’t know if we were nervous, but we just weren’t normal,” Snow said. “We weren’t nervous, but we just weren’t ourselves at the beginning.”
While Canyon Springs (26-3) was forcing McQueen (16-11) into turnovers, the Pioneers also were struggling to control the ball. They had six turnovers in the first quarter but cleaned things up after that, turning the ball over six more times in the final three quarters.
“It was hard adjusting to the longer court, the wider court,” Snow said. “Once we got the feel of it, we got things going in the second half.”
That meant finding the 6-foot-6-inch Snow inside. He had eight of his 13 points in the third quarter.
“Adrian was getting behind their defense a little bit, and we weren’t catching him over the top (in the first half),” Branham said. “We talked about seeing him over the top because Adrian runs the floor well.
“That’s one of the things we try to do to stretch the defense.”
Branham said the team also focused on extending its defense and putting more pressure on McQueen in the second half. The Lancers didn’t have the quickness to match Canyon Springs and would have been content to keep the game’s tempo slow.
“We had to be more aggressive,” Branham said. “We couldn’t allow them to dictate the pace of the game. We tried to extend the defense a little bit as far as trapping and putting more pressure on them.”
While the Pioneers were trying to extend their lead, McQueen junior Rollins Stallworth was doing everything he could to keep the Lancers in the game.
Stallworth, who finished with a game-high 17 points, was effective pulling up off the dribble from 15 to 17 feet.
A pair of buckets by Jared Brandon early in the fourth quarter helped Canyon Springs extend its lead to 12 points, and McQueen got no closer than eight in the final 4:20.
Brandon came off the bench to score a team-high 14 points.
“Jared’s a heck of a player,” Branham said. “He can post up, put the ball on the floor, he’s strong when he takes the ball to the basket, and he can step out and shoot the 3. He’s a very versatile player, and we expect things like that out of him coming off the bench.”
Donald Anderson added 12 points and Michael Thompson 10 for the Pioneers.
