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Schools

Eagles Boys' Basketball Unable to Solve Bulldawgs' Borrowed Defense

West Deptford came out of the gates slow and never recovered in a 76-34 loss to rival Haddonfield.

When Haddonfield Memorial High School boys’ basketball coach Paul Wiedeman decided to change up his team’s defensive approach, he wasn’t doing it on a whim. Instead, he was doing it on the sage advice of one of South Jersey’s best basketball minds.

“We made a radical change in our philosophy,” said Wiedeman. “We are going to a matchup zone that we borrowed from Coach (John) Valore from Cherry Hill East, who came out and showed us how to do this.”

Valore spent 35 years as the head coach of Cherry Hill East’s program, and built a reputation for producing aggressive, yet sound defense.

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On Thursday, the Bulldawgs showed just how tenacious that defense can be in a 76-34 drubbing of Colonial Conference rival .

Constant pressure forced West Deptford into quick, contested shots, which led to a transition game that showed off Haddonfield’s long-range scoring threats.

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“It’s working well,” Wiedeman said of his newly implemented defense. “You are aggressive from the jump, and teams sometimes don’t know to react to it. We either get a steal or they take a quick shot, which leads to our transition game. That’s our philosophy: make them take a quick shot, get the rebound and go down the other end.”

It certainly knocked the Eagles off their heels. Haddonfield sprinted out to a 7-0 lead and by the end of the first quarter held a staggering 19-2 lead.

The game never tightened up.

“They took us out of everything we wanted to do,” said West Deptford coach Don Clark. “Those guards were all over, and we just didn’t do a good job. Our shot selection wasn’t very good and they hurried us. Everything was hurried.

"We are more of a control team, and I think they made us play at a faster pace. You have to give them credit; they just took us out of everything.”

Junior Billy Griffin shredded apart the Eagles with his three-point shooting. He scored 10 of Haddonfield’s first 15 points and finished with a game-high 27 points. Chris Biddle added 15 points, while Mike Lacatena had 13 for the Bulldawgs (7-1).

Griffin–a JV player last year–connected on five of Haddonfield’s 11 three-pointers.

“When we share the ball and move it around, we get good shots,” said Griffin. “We got a lot of balance on this team, a lot of different guys who step up on different nights. When we move the ball, we get open looks and we got guys that can shoot the ball.”

Griffin certainly earned the respect of the Eagles.

“I still think defensively, we played well,” said Clark, whose Eagles fell to 4-3. “We defended them, but how do you defend 25 feet? There’s not a defense in the world that can defend kids that are hitting 25-foot shots.”

Tom Jakubowski led the Eagles with 10 points, Justin Hansen had nine, and TJ Harcum came off the bench to provide two thunderous blocks.

West Deptford is back in action Tuesday at Collingswood in the first of six-straight road games. They take to the road on a down note, but Clark was quick to tell his team not to look to deep for meaning from Thursday’s game.

“You don’t get two losses just because you lost by 40, you get one,” Clark said. “One loss isn’t any more than that, it’s one loss.”

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