MBB: Thunderwolves nail down third straight triumph

Manny Furtado’s squad is on a roll.

But the first-year coach says while three straight wins are nice, the Lakehead Thunderwolves have plenty of work to clean up their mistakes before he’s ready to cut them some slack.

The Wolves, plagued by poor shot selection and far too many missed free throws – 15 in total on Saturday night – held on against a hard-charging, playoff-hungry Waterloo Warriors team at the Thunderdome, eking out an 86-82 win.

“Between shot selection and our turnovers, it’s a lot of possessions that we’re wasting,” said Furtado, his team outscored 50-44 in the second half.

“If you look at the stats, they ended up shooting 11 more shots than us. Shot selection is part of that. If you take a bad shot, it’s just the same as a turnover.”

While he wants his team to be confident, he doesn’t want the Thunderwolves (8-6) to read too much into the recent spate of wins, coming off a pair of tough losses to the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country.

They haven’t proven anything yet, Furtado said.

“There’s confidence and then there is fake confidence,” he said. “I just hope that the guys don’t think that the three wins in a row means anything. The next couple of opponents are better, than the teams we just faced.

“We’ve just got to get better. We’ve got to worry about ourselves and improving. Right now, we’ve got three straight wins, and I don’t want to take that away from them, but we’ve still got lots of room for improvement.”

Fifth-year forward Anthony McIntosh, whose thunderous, highlight-reel dunk late in the fourth help cement the win – he finished with 21 – said the message was delivered loud and clear.

“I think it was a good building block,” McIntosh said. “Obviously we still have a lot of work to do. Coach spoke about fake confidence and I think we could definitely take from that. We need to tidy up the things we need to tidy up.”

Defence and turnovers were at the top of McIntosh’s list.

“It’s good to get the W, a win’s a win, but at the same time, we still know we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

McIntosh and fellow forward Bacarius Dinkins keyed the win, offering a strong inside presence all game long. Dinkins added 19 points, including a pair of fourth-quarter dunks, and grabbed eight boards, all of the defensive variety.

“The posts had to do what they had to do to get the job done,” said the soft-spoken Jonesville, Fla. native.

Up two after one, the Wolves stretched their lead to 10 at the half, Dwayne Harvey picking up eight of his 20 points in the quarter. Henry Tan added six of his own.

But the Golden Hawks (5-8) were persistent in the second half, riding Will Coulthard’s 29-point performance, including a 10-point third quarter that ended with a three from just inside half court that closed the gap to just two.

Dinkins helped the Wolves pull away in the fourth, scoring LU’s first eight points – he’d finish with 12 in the period.