Sometimes a wake-up call is a good thing.
Joseph Jones hopes the one the Lakehead Thunderwolves got last Friday at the hands of the Ryerson Rams is enough to push them over the hump on Friday when they take on the Fraser Valley Cascades to open the CIS national men’s basketball championship.
They won’t be taking anything for granted this weekend in Halifax, Jones said.
“I see this as a learning experience. We can take this loss and use it as fuel and just take it out on other teams,” Jones said Monday prior to practice.
“We’re upset that we didn’t get to the OUA championship, obviously, but that’s behind us. We’re not going to dwell on it. We’re just going to move on and stay focused. This is our third national championship appearances, so we’re just going to take it one game at a time.”
Jones, perhaps the best sixth man in Ontario, had 14 points in the 86-70 loss, including four three-pointers.
Finding that elusive first win is the only thing on their minds, he said.
“Our last two trips to nationals, it’s been that first-game hump that we just couldn’t get over. But all that’s behind us. We’re just focused and we’ve just got to stick together. We’re not really worried about that first game. We’re just worried about doing our game plan and as long as we stick to our game plan, then we should be fine.”
That’s what got them off track at Waterloo against the Rams, said second-year guard Ben Johnson, glad for the second chance to play in his native Nova Scotia.
The loss to Ryerson was a shock to a team that went 20-2 in the regular season and owned the No. 2 ranking in Canada for the final seven weeks of the campaign.
But that might be a good thing, Johnson said.
“I think we can beat anyone, but we can also get beaten by anyone,” he said. “So we’ve got to bring it. We watched over the game and we basically didn’t play Lakehead basketball. We didn’t play a lot of help defence.
“We were selfish at times and that’s just not what we do. We kind of pride ourselves on ball movement and defence and that’s what we need to get back to.”
The Wolves, who met Canada West’s Trinity Western in last year’s opener, say they’re preparing for a similar opponent Friday when they hit the court at 11 a.m. EST against Fraser Valley, a game that can be seen online at SSN Canada.
Johnson called the Cascades a classic West Coast team with big bodies who can shoot the lights out of the ball.
“They’ll bring in a 6-foot-7 player at the three position (and look for) mismatches, (and for us it’s ) not so much worrying about the mismatches, but trying to exploit them at the other end. So if you have a 6-foot-seven guy that you have to guard defensively, yeah, it’s tough, but he has to guard you on the other end.”
Pivot Yoosrie Salhia said the Wolves didn’t take care of things offensively or defensively in Waterloo and will have to adjust against the Cascades – without deep threat Ryan Thomson, unlikely to play with a torn planter fasciitis tendon in his foot.
Thomson's absence will be felt, Salhia said, but can be overcome.
“It hurts us a lot more than what most people think. He spreads the floor for us, he’s our best shooter, but at this point in the game, we can’t even be thinking about that, that we’re not going to have him. We wish we had him, but right now we’ve just got to move forward,” Salhia said.
Coach Scott Morrison, whose team departs Tuesday for Halifax, said he wants his troops to stay loose, yet focused, paying attention to the basics and not worrying about the little things they can’t control. He’s confident they learned what they needed to in last week’s loss.
“There’s the on-court lessons and the off-court lessons. We talked about both and we’re just real fortunate that we had such a great season that we get the chance one week later to redeem ourselves and make the changes we think are necessary.”
