HOLYOKE — As the Amherst boys basketball team watched its lead slip away late in the third quarter and early in the fourth during a 58-52 loss to Holyoke on Monday night, Hurricanes head coach Jamahl Jackson hung on to his timeouts and chose to let his team figure out how to beat the Purple Knights’ unrelenting full-court press on their own.
Jackson watched as Amherst turned the ball over five straight times, but knew it was a learning opportunity for his bunch at this juncture in the season. The Hurricanes’ eight-point lead with under two minutes left in the third dwindled down to one at the end of the frame, and completely vanished as they faced an eight-point deficit just a handful of possessions into the fourth quarter.
The 16-point swing sent the home crowd into a frenzy, and Jamil Rivera’s second tomahawk jam was the cherry on top. Eventually, Jackson was forced to call a timeout.
“It’s invaluable to have a test like this in front of this crowd early in the season,” Jackson said. “We gotta be able to grow from this. And I said it to our guys during a timeout, we know things are gonna go wrong. We’re gonna make mistakes, the crowd is gonna be in it, but we can’t allow that to rattle us and take us away from still being able to execute.”
As for Rivera’s dunks, it injected a ton of energy into each Holyoke player, which propelled them over the top on Monday.
“Any time you see a dunk in a high school game it gets you going,” Holyoke head coach Juan Maldonado said. “The crowd got into it, our boys got hyped up. That was definitely key.”
During Holyoke’s points-off-turnovers run, Purple Knights guard Davian Diaz was fouled and stepped to the line for two shots. As the players lined up, Amherst star Marcielo Aquino moseyed his way over to the Purple Knights’ bench where head coach Juan Maldonado was standing.
Aquino and Maldonado have become close through the sport, so they had a quick chat while Diaz attempted his free throws. The senior asked Maldonado what Holyoke was going to run for a defense on the next possession. Maldonado told him a diamond press, and predicted Aquino would turn the ball over.
Amherst turned it over two possessions in a row, leading to two Purple Knights buckets.
“I know [Aquino] really well, and he literally came over to the bench and asked what we were running,” Maldonado said of his interaction. “I told him exactly what we were doing, a diamond press, and I told him he was gonna turn the ball over, just messing with him. That’s exactly what he did, he turned it over twice. And part of it was the fatigue, he played most of the game, and we knew that. We all know once you’re tired, you make mistakes that you normally wouldn’t make. That’s what happened.”
Maldonado was a star point guard at Holyoke himself, wearing purple and white from 2002 to 2006. He could do it all on both ends and facilitated the offense really well – the true definition of a floor general. And since he graduated, Holyoke has continued to pump out talented guards. In fact, even before he was there the Purple Knights were known for their stellar guard play.
That is once again the case for the 2023-24 season. Holyoke has four or five guards who all do different things – whether it’s shoot the three-ball, drive to the basket, thread the needle with pinpoint passes, or run the offense with intelligence and tempo. Diaz, Dylan Rohan, Aden Cabrera, Luis Figueroa, and Shawn Rivera are the ones keeping the trend rolling in the backcourt.
“Holyoke is known, from when I played, even before I played, as a guard factory,” Maldonado said. “That’s what we have right now. This team is living up to that expectation. We have a lot of guards that can do different things.”
Jackson knows Aquino is capable of taking care of the ball much better than he showed on Monday, so he isn’t worried about spending too much time talking about it with his captain. Jackson said after the game that Aquino “knows he should be better than that,” but also mentioned that the ‘Canes wouldn’t have even been in a position to win if it weren’t for his 17 points, including several crucial third-quarter plays not just offensively, but defensively as well.
“He plays both sides of the ball, he plays very hard, and he’s a great kid,” Jackson said. “He’ll grow from this experience. It’s the second game of the season. We got plenty more basketball to play.”
Despite the unfortunate end to Monday night’s game, Jackson was still pleased to see his team have a fighting chance against what he thinks is one of the best teams in western Massachusetts. And after a disappointing start to the year last week against South Hadley (a 54-45 loss), Monday’s performance at least gets Amherst going in the right direction.
The ‘Canes have the opportunity to bounce back in a big way on Friday night when they take on longtime rival Northampton in the Battle of the Bridge in the Pioneer Valley Tip-Off at the Mullins Center. That game is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m.
“I’m proud of how we performed,” Jackson said. “No disrespect to South Hadley, but I thought we laid an egg against them. They wanted it more than us, so I knew we had to come out and show improvement against one of the better teams in western Mass. in Holyoke. I really enjoyed how we played for three and a half quarters, but that span of time when we got very careless with the ball shifted momentum. We got away from executing and getting the shots we wanted, but we will grow from this. We have no choice because Friday we go and play Northampton, our rival, at the Mullins Center. So this was a great prep for that.”
