Basketball Down To Last Week; NASCAR Coming Soon

High School Men’s basketball

R-S Central East Rutherford should be locks into the playoffs, seeding is still in question.

R-S Central’s guys lost another close game to Kings Mountain this past week, but earned possibly their biggest win of the season lat Friday. A 45-42 win at top-seeded 2A SMAC East Burke was just what the Hilltoppers needed.

Chris Searcy led a balanced attack with 14 points and nine rebounds, while Brain Hunt had 13 points and Juwan Burnette ended up with 10. Desmond Whitesides dished out nine assists. While Central hosted East Rutherford on 2/10, they will finish off at Burns on 2/13.

East Rutherford easily took care of Draughn early last week, 71-47, but lost a spectacular game against Crest 87-82 last Friday.

Two heavyweights went at it with Crest winning the first round and third, while East took the second and fourth. However, Crest had done too much damage in the third that the Cavs were enabled to overcome.

East was down for most of the first half, but Juwan Blanton’s steal and lay up followed by the up and under drive to the basket gave East its first lead of the game at 34-33. The Cavs led 46-24 at half.

Jerick Haynes (39 points) steal and one-handed jam capped a 19-4 Crest run and turned the East half time lead to an 11-point deficit during the third period. 

“I thought our effort was good tonight, there was about four minutes where I think we lost this one,” East Rutherford Basketball Coach Brad Levine said. “We made too many turnovers and weren’t able to take as many shots, especially in the third quarter.” They will host Chase to end the regular season on 2/13. 

Ladies Basketball

The No.1 SMAC seed in the 2A playoffs will go to R-S Central (16-5, 12-2). The Lady Hilltoppers survived a feisty Kings Mountain club in overtime (52-44) and controlled a 51-44 win at East Burke. Te’ja Twitty posted a 30 points effort to go along with 25 rebounds in the win against East Burke. The team also had 28 steals in the last two games.

East Rutherford may sneak into the playoffs after all. If they can notch their tenth win of the season in an upcoming game against Chase, they might just get one of the last two wildcard spots. They also could have to play Draughn in the first round of the conference tourney and the Lady Cavs have already beat them twice this season.

Daytona is upon us. On Saturday night, it’s the Sprint Unlimited race. Just 75 laps for 25 drivers, who will compete as all 16 Chase teams from 2014, former winners of the event, pole winners from 2014 and past Daytona 500 pole winners are able to participate.

Four things to keep in mind  as the season moves forward. It is Jeff Gordon’s last season, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has a new crew chief, Carl Edwards is with Joe Gibbs Racing. Finally, I never thought I would say this, but Kurt Busch makes Kyle Busch look normal. Kevin Harvick, Brad Keselowski and Denny Hamlin all run this event well. I will take Harvick since he has won the event twice as they have the team to beat.

ACC Basketball

Duke has done well all year, but they just opened up a whole different can on Notre Dame this past weekend. North Carolina got past Boston College as expected and the Feb. 18 Clash should be interesting. If I’m an NCAA Tourney team, I don’t think I want to play Duke or UNC come March.

Sadly, North Carolina, the NCAA and the world lost a basketball coaching icon Dean Smith, who passed away at the age of 83 on Saturday night in Chapel Hill. Smith coached his team to 13 straight Sweet 16’s at one time and that is still an NCAA record. He made 23 consecutive NCAA Tourney’s and won two National Championships. Recruiting wasn’t a problem either, Smith coached Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Eric Montross and Sam Perkins. He also promoted desegregation during his 36-year reign as a Tarheel.