By TOM BONE
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
PRINCETON — Sharing the ball made a difference Tuesday night.
Dashing the basketball all over the halfcourt, the Princeton Senior High boys broke a three-game losing streak, beating the Nitro Wildcats 84-63 on The Ralph Ball Court.
The visitors’ attempts to double-team 6-foot-8 center Aaron Ferguson and his pals in the paint merely opened the door to baseline cuts and open shots by teammates at a fast and furious tempo.
“That’s when we’re a pretty good basketball team, when we’re pushing the ball up the floor,” said Princeton (2-3, 1-2 MSAC) head coach Ernie Gilliard. “We have a tendency to share the ball, we rotate the ball well and we get ball and body movement.”
He said about Ferguson’s response to the Nitro defense, “When he started recognizing the double-team coming to him, he was able to share the ball to his teammate Logan McKinney and to several of the other players as we got several back-door layups ... that allowed us to get some separation.”
Nitro (2-5, 1-2) head coach Garrett Burdette said Princeton was “well-coached, disciplined. They got the ball to their big, underneath. That really hurt us. We don’t have as much size.”
Ferguson said, “We’ve been going hard in practice here lately. We just needed to play like we can, and that’s what we did tonight.”
Nitro came within a point of tying the game at 7-6 midway through the first quarter, then went four minutes without a field goal.
The Tigers used an 11-0 run in the middle of the second quarter to pull out to a 35-19 edge, and Nitro finished off the period with a 7-3 run to trim Princeton’s edge to 38-26 at halftime.
The Wildcats scored back-to-back fast-break buckets in the third quarter to produce a 50-40 score, but Ashton O’Dell grabbed a steal, leading to a trey from Cole Cochran — Princeton’s only 3-point field goal of the night — to turn the momentum again.
Burdette said, “We were making a run there. I kind of tried to light a fire under our guys, pulling some of them out there, and it worked.”
“They battled, the whole game. We’re in a rebounding process at Nitro. We’re taking our chops, sometimes, but we’re coming out and playing hard every night, and that’s what we want.”
Burdette said about the tempo, “We like to go fast. We had our moments where we were going fast, and we’d get back in (the game), and then they slowed it down. ... They did a great job of slowing it down.”
Ferguson was on the bench for most of the third quarter with three fouls, but he turned it on in the final eight minutes, scoring 13 of his game-high 31 points. He also led Princeton with 11 rebounds.
“There, the first couple of quarters, I was pretty soft,” Ferguson said. “I wasn’t really getting anything, so I had to just tough it up and get physical.”
O’Dell had four of Princeton’s nine steals. Logan McKinney had 12 points and eight rebounds and Colton Fix served up four assists.
Princeton was coming off a loss at Winfield on Jan. 2 in which Gilliard said, “We shot absolutely terrible. ... So to come back and get a win here was huge, simply because the kids began to get a little frustrated, based on their performance the other night.”
“We’re extremely pleased to get this. I love their energy that they came with tonight.
“I thought our defense was good; we’ve got a few plays and a few situations where we’ve got to clean up our defense, but overall I think we’re growing and we’re moving in the right direction.”
He credited young players like Cochran and point guard Aaron McCabe for their play off the bench.
He added, “We’ve got one senior who didn’t do a lot of scoring for us tonight, but I thought he was a a tremendous floor general, and made a lot of plays for us, and that was Ashton O’Dell.
“His energy, his defense, his rebounding, his sharing the basketball with other players, and making the right plays. I thought all of that was great for us.”
O’Dell said, “I thought we worked really hard, together.” Asked about help off his bench, the senior said, “It helps us build for next year. It gets them some reps just in case something happens to our other players.”
The Tigers had not won since their season opener on Dec. 9 at Shady Spring. Princeton came into Tuesday’s contest averaging 52.5 points per game and giving up a little more than 69 per game.
Princeton hosts the Huntington Highlanders on Saturday at 3 p.m. before embarking on a series of three conference road games. A game originally set for Thursday at Cabell Midland has been rescheduled for Jan. 19.
— Contact Tom Bone at
tbone@bdtonline.com;
Twitter @BDTBone

At The Ralph Ball Court
NITRO (2-5)
Ian Lee 4 0-0 12, Grant Williams 1 0-0 2, Dom Rahatt 8 6-11 22, Ryan Eary 1 0-0 2, Devin Hanna 3 0-0 7, Neil Sallada 4 8-12 16, Derek Perry 1 0-2 2. Totals 22 14-25 63.
PRINCETON (2-3)
Colton Fix 2 5-6 9, Jacob Whittington 0 1-2 1, Cole Cochran 3 1-2 8, Logan Watkins 2 0-0 4, Aaron McCabe 0 2-4 2, Ashton O’Dell 2 1-2 5, Logan McKinney 9 3-4 12, Aaron Ferguson 11 9-12 31, Garrison Hartwell 0 3-4 3. Totals 29 25-36 84.
Nitro............................12 14 17 20 — 63
Princeton....................16 22 20 26 — 84
3-point goals — Nitro 5 (Lee 4, Hanna 1); Pctn 1 (Cochran). Fouled out — Nitro, Hanna. Technical fouls — Nitro, Salada, Lee. Total fouls — Nitro 20, Pctn 18.