First Posted: 1/16/2015
LIMA – Officially, Lima Senior’s 90-45 boys basketball win over Oregon Clay ended around 9:15 Friday night.
Unofficially, it was over long before that. Long, long before that.
It reached the point of no return somewhere between the time Jaylin Thomas won the opening tip and the time the Spartans went up 36-4 in the game’s first 11 ½ minutes.
Lima Senior hit 27 of its first 35 field goal attempts, many of them uncontested lay-ups, which were set up by 17 first-half turnovers by Clay.
The Spartans (5-2, 2-1 Three Rivers Athletic Conference) were never threatened by Clay (0-11, 0-6 TRAC).
Twelve Lima Senior players scored and all the scoring in in the fourth quarter was done by subs. Lima Senior’s biggest lead was 58 points at 84-26 in the first minute of the fourth quarter.
“We understood if we played the way we wanted to play we could get a win,” Lima Senior coach Quincey Simpson said. “We just didn’t want to have any letdowns mentally. And I was glad we didn’t.
“I saw some things we didn’t do so well that if we do in these games coming up, it will probably hurt us. But I thought the energy was there. I thought defensively for the most part early in the game we were rotating well. We were rebounding well and limiting those guys to one-shot opportunities. Obviously when you get a lead like that, everything is going to go kind of south. But in the first half we definitely made a statement and I was pleased,” he said.
Lima Senior honored All-Ohio football players Malik Townsend, Darius Cowsey, Jaden Walker, Marquis Graham, Juniel Liles and Ruben Flowers at halftime. It also honored girls basketball player Rion Thompson for recently scoring her 1,000th career point as a junior.
