The Killer Bees Take a Beating

There are ways to beat a 2-3 zone, though the Bridgehampton High School boys basketball team wasn’t very good at employing them in the state Class D regional final played at Center Moriches High School Friday evening.

As a result, the Bees — a young team, it should be said — absorbed a 61-44 beating at the hands of Newfield Central, the fourth-ranked Class D team in the New York State Sportwriters Association poll.

The Trojans were up 61-30 when their subs came in to play the final two and a half minutes.

It wasn’t that Ron White’s players didn’t know what to do — they were quite familiar, he said afterward, with four different offensive sets designed to attack a 2-3 — but they began to lose confidence in the early going, he said, when their shots failed to fall.

The good news is that presumably everyone — J.P. Harding, Elijah White, Nae’ Jon Ward, Jonny De Groot, Nate DePasquale, Jahqur Carr, Miguel Maradiaga, and William Walker — will be back next year. Harding, De Groot, and Carr will be seniors; White, Ward, DePasquale, and Maradiaga, juniors, and Walker will be a sophomore.

White said they will continue to play in the off-season, in a Hampton Bays league, and in Amateur Athletic Union tournaments.

He could probably have done a better job as a coach — he certainly could have run them more — added White, who, with one of his assistants, Maurice Manning, played on Killer Bee state-championship teams in the mid-’90s, and who later, again with Manning, played on two national junior college championship teams at Suffolk Community College-Selden. Those teams are in Suffolk County’s Hall of Fame.

All in all, however, it had been a pretty good season, the first-year coach concluded. The Bees began slowly, but came on in league play, and had won a round in the state tournament. 

Harding, after a recent loss to Greenport in the county’s C-D game, put his finger on it when he said the offense had to “flow more.” 

Then, of course, there’s defense — the ball-hawking, in-your-face kind, a hallmark of Killer Bee basketball for the past 40 years, a swarming defense that can lead to easy fast-break layups. There wasn’t much of that in evidence on Friday night, though.

Bridgehampton came up empty on its first five tries from the floor — and on two free throw attempts — before White converted a pass from Ward for 8-2. That was to be the Bees’ sole basket in the first quarter, by the end of which Newfield, which wasn’t playing all that great either, led 9-2.

“Nothing’s happening,” an observer said during the interim. “They’ve got to penetrate.”

By halftime, it was 25-12 Newfield, and, with the game still within reach, the Bees’ fans were hoping for a breakthrough in the third. In the initial moments of that quarter it seemed as if Ward, the only Bee to attempt a 3-point shot in the first half (a miss off to the left of the rim), might provide the yearned-for spark. Following a Newfield turnover, White inbounded to Bridgehampton’s diminutive point guard, who, after taking a step forward, let it go from beyond the top of the key. Swish. Everybody cheered. A minute or so later, after a shot by White had gone in and out, Ward went deep again, bringing the Bees to within 7 points, at 25-18.

But that was to be as close as the Bees were to get that night. 

Two made free throws and a basket by Gregory Moravec (who had followed his own miss) sandwiched around a drive to the hoop from the foul line by Harding made it 29-20, at which point the visitors went on a 12-2 run during which Joshua Wood canned two 3s and Jacob Humble one, effectively putting the game away.

White was applauded as he exited the game, having been assessed his fifth foul, with 4 minutes and 13 seconds left to play. At that point, the Trojans were sailing along at 55-30. A minute later, Newfield’s coach emptied his bench.

Wood had a game-high 22 points for Newfield Central. Harding led the Bees’ scoring with 18, Ward had 14, and White, 12. It was the lowest total for Bridgehampton since its lopsided nonleague losses to Babylon, Mattituck, and Center Moriches in December.

“This is a young team — we’ll be back,” White vowed. “We’ve learned from every game we’ve played this year. We’re back to square one. But we’ll come back — bigger and stronger. We were getting looks, but couldn’t put it down. You’ve got to put it down. . . . I think we panicked a bit in the beginning. But we’ll be back. I believe in the black and gold. We’re going to grow.”