City of Basketball Love

Michael Bullock (@thebullp_n)
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HERSHEY — Maybe familiarity is helpful as basketball teams try to find a way to skip deeper and deeper into postseason play’s unforgiving depths.

Take Danny Walck’s Hempfield Black Knights, who wandered into Hershey’s Giant Center for District 3’s Class 6A semis having knocked off a pair of foes the Lancaster-Lebanon League side had encountered — and lost to — in the regular season.

Since Lebanon was next up on Hempfield’s postseason slate, that trend of playing teams the Black Knights squared off against during the regular season was still intact.

So would the Cedars go the same way as Manheim Twp. and Governor Mifflin and fall victim to Walck’s surging club with a berth in Saturday’s 6A final on the line?

Well, that answer is a resounding yes.

Getting 29 points and nine rebounds from 6-5 junior Ryan Moffatt — Moffatt also dished out four assists — Hempfield ground out a 53-40 victory over its L-L Section 1 rivals that kept the Knights’ hopes for a 6A crown in plain sight.

Tyler Hilton added 11 points for Walck’s Knights (19-8), who not only shot better than 50 percent (17-for-32) from the field and buried seven treys — Hilton and Moffatt each canned three treys, while Javon Mitchell also connected from deep — but also limited Lebanon’s ability to unleash its potentially lethal dribble drive attack.

Hilton and Bryan Karl backed Moffatt with five boards apiece.

“I give them all the credit in the world,” said Walck, who guided Lancaster Catholic to a championship game (Class AA) in 1992. “They bought in and decided to play together. That grit and all that glued together has made us a playoff basketball team.

“It’s really special.”

Up next in Saturday’s 6A final at Giant Center — Hempfield last appeared in a District 3 championship game in 2010 when Walck’s son, Christian, was a backcourt standout — is a date with Mid-Penn Commonwealth Division hammer Harrisburg.

Harrisburg upended top-seeded Reading 61-58 in the later semi.

Shaquell Ortiz’s 12 points topped Lebanon (21-6), which split a pair of regular-season clashes with the Knights. Tim Speraw’s Cedars, who led 5-4 late in the opening quarter but at no other point, will play Reading in Thursday’s third-place game.

Able to play downhill throughout, Hempfield put its motion attack to good use while mixing zone and man at the defensive end. What the zones did was hinder the driving abilities of Luis Aquino-Rios, Cam Shaak and Ortiz, all of whom attack the rim.

“We just wanted to play 1-on-1 defense, stay on our feet and contain their dribble drive,” Moffatt said. “We were able to do that tonight.”

Deep shooters Shaak and Dante Vargas also found getting open looks from deep to be a difficult proposition (Lebanon was 3-for-12) against Hempfield’s length.

Aquino-Rios was successful on a couple of iso plays late in the first half — he also  pocketed a trey just before the buzzer that had Speraw’s bunch within five (21-16) at the break — but the Cedars had all sorts of problems offensively.

They had some defensive issues, too, since Moffatt netted 14 first-half points.

“I was getting open looks and my teammates were throwing me really good passes,” Moffatt said. “We moved the ball really well and I was just able to knock them down.”

Unable to finish, the Cedars also couldn’t get their pressure set up and that allowed the taller Knights to settle into their half-court stuff. Screens and cuts to the bucket that led to easy hoops were a typical outcome for Walck’s patient group.

And Moffatt, much of the time, was the beneficiary.

“He’s a basketball player,” Walck said. “He loves to play.”

While Lebanon was able to climb within six (35-29) on Ortiz’s finish of a Vargas dish, Walck’s Knights promptly rattled off nine consecutive points and constructed a 44-29 cushion on back-to-back drives by David Martin-Robertson.

The 6-4 Martin-Robertson only scored five points, but he dished out six assists and blocked a pair of shots.

Lebanon did get it to within 11 (45-34) with 2:42 to play, but the Knights were cool down the stretch and canned all eight of their free-throw attempts.

Hempfield also was a perfect 6-for-6 from the floor in the final quarter.

“There’s always room for improvement, but we’re confident and we made some shots,” Walck said. “Making shots helps you look like a good coach.”

As a result, they’ll be returning to Giant Center later this week.

Yet even though the Knights have yet to meet Harrisburg this season, that wasn’t the case Tuesday night against Lebanon as familiarity likely played a role.

“I think it did,” said Moffatt, who was 10-for-13 from the floor and 3-for-3 from the arc. “We knew coming in what we needed to do in order to win. We lost to them early in the season, but we beat them the second time so I think we started to figure them out.

“We made some more shots than them tonight and we played really good defense I thought — as a team,” Moffatt added.

“When you get to this and you draw somebody from your own league, everything’s pretty familiar,” Walck echoed. “You might put a different wrinkle in here or there. Thought we had to take care of the dribble drive. I thought they got into our gut [in the first half] and that’s why we went zone.”

Defense.

Offense.

Lots of stuff worked for a seventh seed that’s about to play in the final.

“That’s what the tournament is all about when you get in,” Walck said. “I was just talking to the assistant coaches about the time when Chambersburg, not long ago, was seeded [15th] and made that run [to the 2012 Class AAAA championship] and did some special things there with [head coach] Shawn Shreffler.

“You try to sell to the kids that this is special and you have a right to play in this. It’s a great state, it’s a great district, it’s a great league that we represent, let’s go make the most of it and keep improving. It takes a little luck, but it’s not the first rodeo,” Walck added. “I’m just very appreciative of their effort and their stick-to-it-ness.

“I think that’s what we’re seeing now.”

And there’s a good chance we’ll see it again on Saturday.