Never had opportunity knocked so hard on Carson’s front door.
This was going to be its chance to show some 2,500 paying customers at Goodman Gym ó and the rest of the state, for that matter ó that its 10-1 start was no fluke. And that its No. 1 seed in the Sam Moir Christmas Classic was more than justified.
This was the night the Cougars would puff out their chests and show off the program’s growth chart. They were going to demonstrate they had come of age and could match anyone in the tournament shot for shot and razzle for dazzle.
Except that they couldn’t. And ultimately, they didn’t.
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Carson was all set to dive in, then realized there was no water in the pool.
“We collapsed as a team,” dejected forward Cody Clanton said after glow-in-the-dark Salisbury squashed the Cougars in Tuesday’s semifinal. “And we couldn’t pick ourselves back up.”
It’s hard to blame Clanton for Carson’s late-December chill. On a night when nearly everything went wrong for the Cougars, he couldn’t make it right.
“Cody was aggressive,” fourth-year coach Brian Perry noted after Clanton scored a game-high 18 points. “He did all the things we talked about as far as attacking their pressure. He hit some important shots in the first half and some more in the second half. He was a bright spot.”
One of few. Senior Darius Moose, the county’s leading scorer with a 20.9 average, was routinely denied the ball and shot just 3-for-11 from the field, finishing with eight points in 23 foul-plagued minutes. Teammate Brandon Ferrare, the guard who puts the run in Carson’s run-and-gun, had three assists and four turnovers and played only 19 minutes due to foul trouble. Both spent much of the third quarter chained to the bench ó and left Perry looking like someone just ran over his dog.
“Salisbury took away our weapons,” he said. “They had a good game plan and played a good game.”
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On this night, it proved fatal. Carson without Moose and Ferrare on the floor is like AC/DC going onstage without Malcolm and Angus. Salisbury cashed in by revving its gun-the-engine offense and stretching a 13-point lead to 66-40 after three periods.
“We just got smashed,” senior Derrick Sewell said after contributing 15 points off the Carson bench. “We weren’t ready to play. Maybe we were playing scared. The truth is, any team can compete with us when our shots aren’t falling.”
The truth is, they weren’t. Carson’s first half included a most-glaring statistic: 2-for-14 from three-point range. That from a team known to sling it from anywhere.
“It’s not that those shots were closely contested,” Perry said. “But Salisbury made us take them quick. When we missed a couple it just kind of snowballed and they got some layups down the other end.”
Compounding the problem was Salisbury’s jackrabbit start. The Hornets hit eight of their first 11 shots from the field and raced to a 20-7 lead in the opening five minutes.
“We couldn’t stop them,” said Clanton. “They were all over the place, diving for loose balls and running the floor. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”
Ferrare could ó and had an explanation.
“We didn’t play to our potential, to our level,” he said. “We didn’t give it our all, even when nothing was working. It’s a wake-up call, I guess. Every team loses. We’ve just got to take it and learn from it.”
That’s the hard part. Everything Carson learned last night will be on the final exam. It surely will face another lightning-quick, opportunistic team like Salisbury before all is said and done.
“For us to become a championship-caliber team,” Perry said, “we have to learn from this and understand it. And we will.”
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Missed opportunity or not, the 10-2 Cougars have nearly arrived. They resemble the kid in the back seat who repeatedly asks, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” A month from now it may be impossible to ignore them.
“We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished before Christmas,” Perry said. “We’re 4-0 in our league. We’ve got some big games with South Rowan and West Rowan, teams we haven’t seen yet. So by no means are we walking around here high on life. We know there’s a lot of work to do. This showed us tonight how much better we need to get.”
Perhaps Clanton said it best when he concluded: “We are for real. We’re 10-2. We just didn’t have a good night.”