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NEGAUNEE — The Negaunee Miners boys basketball team defeated the Munising Mustangs Tuesday night 63-45, but the Miners 18-point win didn’t come easy.


With a slim two-point lead going into half time, the host Miners (9-0, 5-0 Mid-Peninsula Conference) were forced to rally in the second half to fend off the Mustangs.


In the first half, the Mustangs (3-6, 2-5 MPC) utilized long offensive possessions, and the Miners were unable to put any distance between themselves and Munising.


“I just give Munising credit and thought they played a hard, hard game and they executed their game plan,” Miners head coach Mike O’Donnell said. “They slowed it down on us in the first half and they forced it to come down to a possession game and we kind of played right into their hands.”


Munising coach Al Graves said before the game that it would be important for the Mustangs to make each offensive possession deliberate and to limit their mistakes.


“I was real proud of the way we ran our offense,” Graves said.


With merely six turnovers in the first half, the Mustangs were limiting mistakes as well.


“That was a key for us,” Graves said. “You’ve got to limit your mistakes against a good team like Negaunee, and you’ve got to make sure that your shots are quality shots.”


Both the Mustangs and the Miners shot 63 percent from the floor during the game.


Mustang guard Mike Dolkey shot 4-for-5 during the grind-it-out first half, including 3-of-4 from beyond the three-point arc. Dolkey led all scorers with 21 points.


“The thing about Mike was he had a little bit of a flat time early in the year, but he’s starting to come around,” Graves said.


Negaunee’s head coach said Dolkey’s deep threat helped to put the first half’s momentum on the side of the Mustangs.


“When a team is willing to grind it out like that, and all of a sudden Dolkey fires a shot from two feet behind the 3-point line and it goes in, you’ve got to pat your players on the butt and go back and try to get them the next time,” O’Donnell said. “Dolkey got a few of them to go in, and I think that got the ball rolling.


“They just gained momentum, and you could just see it — you could see it in their eyes,” O’Donnell added. “A few shots go in, and everything started flowing just a little bit easier for them.”


At the half, O’Donnell reminded his senior-laden team that they had only 11 games remaining in the regular season, and that they needed to take advantage of the time they had left.


“We needed to get something going, otherwise they would have grinded it out on offense and we wouldn’t have seen the ball for two minutes, and then we would have been in trouble,” O’Donnell said. “We needed something to get a little separation and we got that.”


The Miners outscored the Mustangs 25-11 in the third, much of the scoring coming off the Negaunee defense.


“Our defense sparked us,” O’Donnell said. “We stepped out maybe a foot or two more on defense and got them out of their comfort zone a little bit and stepped into some passing lanes and then that got things going for us.”


Negaunee’s Travis Swanson, who went down on the game’s first possession with an ankle injury, came back into the game to lead the Miners with 19 points.


“I think he twisted that thing pretty good and for him to just tape it up and get right back … Definitely I think if your teammates see that, that they appreciate that you’re ready to get right back in and go to war,” O’Donnell said.


Munising’s head coach was impressed with Swanson’s play as well.


“Travis has got great qualities and those great qualities come from the extremely hard work that he’s put into it. He’s a very fierce competitor and I think he’s got some great qualities to him,” Graves said. “They must have done good work on his ankle there, because he came back and played real well.”


Munising won the JV-game 57-48. Negaunee won the freshman game 44-24.

 

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