Boys basketball: Precise Benet attack takes apart Joliet West in Pontiac Holiday Tournament semifinals

PONTIAC – In the first quarter of Friday’s Pontiac Holiday Tournament semifinal, Benet forward and Dartmouth recruit Niko Abusara threw down a thunderous dunk over a pair of Joliet West defenders.

And although the game was far from decided at that point, Abusara’s dunk was more about establishing that the Redwings were not about to back down from the highly touted Tigers.

“It was surreal. I just got the ball in transition. The play before I had just missed a layup or something, and I didn’t take it as hard as I could,” Abusara said. “So when I got it the second time, I just went up with straight power and speed and completely dunked it. We’ve been preparing for this moment for the entire year. We’ve been wanting Joliet West. We needed that energy so we could get that confidence up. I couldn’t even believe that I did it. It was great.”

Buoyed by a near perfect first half of offensive and defensive execution, Benet held off a second-half push from Joliet West in claiming a 56-47 victory to reach the Pontiac Tournament final for the third time in program history and its first appearance since 2016.

Benet (16-0) will meet Simeon for the tournament championship late Friday. Simeon defeated Curie in the other semifinal 67-58. Benet and Simeon previously met in the 2014 and 2016 finals.

The first half saw an almost flawless effort from Benet.

The Redwings broke down the Tigers with a series of screens and back cuts that often left them with high-percentage scoring opportunities. On the opposite end, Joliet West simply couldn’t find its offensive rhythm, and its typical stopgap maneuver for sparking the offense, the Fears brothers, combined for only two field goals and five total points in the first half against a Benet defense that wouldn’t give an inch.

“Our guys learned their lesson from yesterday,. Yesterday we were not the aggressor, and we played very passively,” Benet coach Gene Heidkamp said. “Today we knew if we were going to beat a team like that, we were going to have to play with a whole different level of toughness and intensity.

“And I thought our guys played really well from the start.”

And based on how things were going, Benet’s 28-16 first-half lead looked insurmountable.

Joliet West managed to climb back into the game largely because of a 10-point third quarter from sophomore Jeremiah Fears. The Tigers closed the quarter with a 10-3 scoring run to cut the Benet advantage to 36-32.

Joliet West then got the Benet lead down to one on three occasions, but the Tigers never were able to completely get over the hill. The final instance of a one-point separation at 42-41 sparked a an 11-3 Benet run that sent the Redwings into the championship game.

Braden Fagbemi led Benet with 14 points, leading three double-figure Redwings scorers that also included Brady Kunka (13 points) and Abusara (10 points). Abusara and Kunka also collected nine and eight rebounds, respectively, as Benet held a 26-22 advantage on the glass.

Justus McNair led all scorers with 15 points for Joliet West, while Jeremiah Fears finished with 12 and Jeremy Fears chipped in 11. A usual source of offensive productivity for the Tigers, the 3-point line, also abandoned them as they connected on only one of 14 3-point shots in the game.

“We won’t make excuses, we had more than enough time to rest and Benet came in on short rest after playing a very competitive game against Bloom and we just didn’t do the best job we could do as coaches and players to go out and effect that game right away,” Joliet West coach Jeremy Kreiger said. “But what I loved was our resiliency and our willingness to fight and get it back to one possession so many times so many times in a row, but we couldn’t quite get that next bucket and couldn’t quite take the lead.”