City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
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Archbishop Carroll got to practice on Sunday and Monday despite the weekend’s enormous winter storm. So the team could not use rust as a reason for its slow start.

Luckily for the Patriots, they had one player who was anxious to get back on the court after Friday night’s loss to Neumann-Goretti, and he played like it from the opening tip.

Senior point guard Josh Sharkey scored 28 points – including all seven of Carroll’s in the first quarter – as his team shook off a bad start to pull away from La Salle for a 66-52 win in Catholic League play. The win kept the Patriots in sole possession of second place in the league at 8-1, while the Explorers fell to 6-3.

On their home court, the Patriots could not buy a bucket early. They made just one of their first 12 shots (a Sharkey 3-pointer), and found themselves trailing, 10-3, five minutes into the game. Out of a timeout, Sharkey came up with a few steals toward the end of the quarter and four more points to cut the deficit to 12-7. In the second quarter he and Carroll started running more, got better looks and had the halftime lead.

"I felt like I didn’t play my best against Neumann, so I wanted to come out here and play my game, get out in transition and get easy buckets,” Sharkey said. “…We were struggling early in the game, so I felt like it was my job to help pick us up on defense. I got a couple of steals and easy buckets. I was trying to get everyone to attack instead of settling, because I feel like we were shooting a lot of jumpers. So I tried to get in the paint and create.”

Sharkey, a Samford commit, did just that, and he often created for himself on a night Carroll’s leading scorer, Ryan Daly, was relatively quiet. Daly had eight points – half of which came from the foul line – but was under his 23.7 PCL point per game average coming into the game.

Sharkey had 17 of his points in the second half and hit a handful of free throws in the fourth quarter, which helped the Patriots put the game away. The guard was a perfect 9-for-9 from the foul line and also had six rebounds and three assists.

“Josh has been so good at understanding when we need a bucket,” Carroll head coach Paul Romanczuk said. “He’s done a great job of being our engine and knowing what we need. Tonight we needed a little scoring punch from him, because La Salle did a good job of taking away our shooters and denying Ryan the basketball and taking us out of a lot of sets we like to run. When that happens, guys need to make plays. And there’s none better, I think in the area, and definitely on our team than Josh.”

Carroll’s scoring picked up after the first quarter, and so did the team’s defense, in the eyes of Romanczuk. The Patriots outscored the Explorers 59-40 over the final three quarters, and Romanczuk saw the little things improving when his team did not have the ball.

“Some of the things we wanted to do, we weren’t locked in and engaged for what we read on the scouting report,” he said. “A couple of loose balls, we let them get to and rebounds. So that was our focus going forward, we wanted to lock in.”

Caroll also locked in offensively, as John Rigsby added 13 points – including a reverse layup that put his team up by 15 with less than four minutes left – and forward Miks Antoms added eight points, six rebounds and had four blocks. Antoms had converted on two and-1s, the second of which came right after he had a block on the defensive end and it was what Romanczuk called “the play of the game.”

Meanwhile La Salle was paced offensively by Ryan McTamney, who had 15 points. The Explorers also got 10 points apiece from Shane Stark, Jarrod Stukes and Matt Paulus. The Explorers now sit behind Roman Catholic, Conwell-Egan and St. Joe’s Prep – who are all 6-2 – for third place in the league, and all four of those teams are vying for playoff spots.