Muskie hoops teams sweep Eagles

The Muskies again proved their excellence in boys’ basketball last Thursday as both the junior and senior teams maintained their dominance in NorWOSSA play.
The junior boys improved to 6-0 after defeating the host Dryden Eagles 44-32. Justin Anderson again led the way with a 10-point effort, backed up by a solid eight from Chris Legg.
“We’re still working on our game,” said head coach Greg Ste. Croix. “And it just seems when one aspect of our game is going really, really well, another aspect sort of drifts away from us.
“I was really impressed with our rebounding [Thursday],” he added. “Chris Legg had eight rebounds, Tyler Abma had five rebounds.
“Jeremy Strain, we have him down for four rebounds, but it’s probably closer to eight-to-10 rebounds.
“We struggled on the offensive side of the game,” Ste. Croix admitted. “I know the score doesn’t [indicate] that, but we still have room to improve offensively and that just goes to playing [more] games.”
While the squad remains unbeaten and virtually untested in NorWOSSA play, Ste. Croix knows they are invincible—and wants to make sure his players remember that, as well.
“We’re getting great challenges from the competition, but we just need to challenge ourselves practice by practice, game by game, quarter by quarter,” he stressed.
“What are we doing well, what do we need to improve on?
“The scores may tell one story,” Ste. Croix. “I think if we played at the level that we’re capable of playing by going through basic things on defence and basic things on offence, I think we would see different scores altogether.
“I mean, 44-32 is a 12-point win, [but] there are holes in our game that we need to work on.”
The senior boys, meanwhile, improved to 5-1 with a 42-37 victory last Thursday in Dryden, led by Morgan Anderson and Travis Stromness, who each notched 11 points.
The win certainly was a far cry from the Muskies’ 64-29 drubbing laid on the Eagles just the week before, but it got the team on a bit of a roll with a second-consecutive victory after losing their first match of the season to the Kenora Broncos.
“We’ve had a bit of a disappointing performance today [Jan. 17],” head coach Paul Noonan admitted.
“We wanted to take it a little easy, so we didn’t play a lot of our bench players throughout the game, so it kind of kept our score potential down to a bit of a small degree.”
The reason for the seniors’ lack of intensity was that they headed straight to the Buckeye Classic Varsity Boys Tournament in Winnipeg right afterwards, where they had to face one of the city’s finest in Garden City that night.
Due to exams, both basketball teams won’t resume NorWOSSA play until Feb. 7, when they host the Kenora Broncos.
Then they’ll play a make-up game with the Dryden Eagles here early the following week to conclude the regular season before heading up to Kenora for the NorWOSSA playoffs on Feb. 14.