“You can see when the game’s on the line he’s not tight, and he’s going into attack mode,” Wayne coach Nate Martindale said. “He plays super aggressive.”
Wayne (2-0, 1-0 GWOC) has been building toward this season coming off 13-12 and 14-10 finishes. Senior guards Malcolm Curry and Cam Fancher, sophomore guard Lawrent Rice and junior forward Elijah Brown formed the core of a deep team coming out of last season.
Johnson transferred from Thurgood Marshall after head coach Shawn McCullough left to become head coach at Springfield. Johnson, a 6-4 senior guard, scored 13 against Northridge in his first game as a Warrior.
“I love it here,” he said. “The energy, the effort, I love everything about it. I knew all of them before I came here. That’s why it felt like home when I came.”
Friday was not a good night for jump shooters. Few of those shots fell for either team. The Warriors made two 3-pointers and the Beavers none. But the Warriors got enough shots near the rim with strong drives and fast-break opportunities. Rice added 12 points and Curry 10.
What created most of Wayne’s offense was it’s 32 minutes of full-court pressure. Sometimes with high-pressure man-to-man and sometimes with two-man traps with long, waving arms against the Beavers’ smaller guards. It sped the Beavers up at times, causing turnovers and quick shots.
“I’m still upset about the loss because if we did the things in the first half that we did in the third and fourth quarter it would have been a tighter ballgame in the fourth quarter,” Pittman said. “Then it just comes down to their will and our will.”
The Wayne pressure changed the game from late in the first quarter and through the first four minutes of the second quarter. The Warriors forced multiple turnovers and the lead grew from 13-10 to 31-10 to 38-14 at halftime.
“Our goal this year is to make each possession tough for the opponent,” Martindale said. “We don’t want to let up for four quarters.”
Full-court pressure isn’t a new thing for the Warriors, but they have ramped it up from using it for about half the game to the whole game.
“The whole team loves it because they’ve been wanting to play like that,” Martindale said. “We want to play fast all the time. We’ve got a lot of talent on our team and everyone can’t handle the pressure that we give them.”
Beavercreek (1-5, 1-4) played its third straight game without its best player, 6-7 junior guard Adam Duvall. He is in a walking boot recovering from a partially torn plantar fascia. Duvall’s exact return is unknown, but Pittman is hopeful it will be soon. Junior center Gabe Phillips led the Beavers with 13 points and sophomore guard Kyle Putnam added 11.
“I give credit to Beavercreek because they play extremely physical and they play really hard for four quarters,” Martindale said. “That’s what we saw on film, and I told our kids they are not going to give up whatsoever.”
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