Park boys basketball faced up against Chaska Feb. 9. Though the game was close, Park took the lead in the second half, eventually winning by 20 points against Chaska.
Assistant coach Rob Griffin said the team’s strategy going into this game was to win on defense.
“It was a huge emphasis on our defense. It’s been the emphasis all season, but after our performance on Tuesday, we took a lot of time Wednesday putting in work,” Griffin said. “Thursday, we had extremely intense practice. I dealt with a lot of defense and that showed today.”
Junior Cleo Mulfinger said the team’s work on defense this week went well and paid off in a victory.
“We shut them out on defense in the first and second half, and when that happened, our offense got looks too,” Mulfinger said. “The second half is when we really locked in on defense and held them to 25 in one half.”
Junior Noah Margolis said the team had one of their best performances all year, especially on defense.
“We wanted to go in and play hard and play well on defense. We don’t worry as much about offense more on the defensive side,” Margolis said. “We played probably the best defense we played this year.”
According to Griffin, the team is still young and inexperienced but has a bright future ahead of them and still gets the job done.
“This is what I hope to see, as a brand new basketball team for Park (that) wants to be known for a team that is big, long, plays fast and makes it really hard to score,” Griffin said. “We have a lot of juniors but for a lot of guys, they’re still only 20 games into their varsity career, so they’re still understanding how to play hard all the time.”
According to Margolis, one of the best things the team did all night was their aggressiveness.
“We knew they had one ball handler so we had to press up on the whole game,” Margolis said. “We play Benilde next so we’re just planning on doing the same thing defensively but this time trying to get some more shots up offensively to have a different outcome then last time we played them.”
Park boys basketball plays Benilde at 7 p.m. Feb. 13 at home.
