Stallions senior shooting guard Blake Hales dishes off a pass to his teammate after being double teamed by Mountain View defenders.
Junior Dillan Giles jockeys for position against a Mountain View defender during the Stansbury Stallions game against the Bruins last Friday.
Stallions player Jonathan Hymas pulls down a rebound over a Mountain View opponent.
Sophomore Aidan Pehrson drives in for a layup during the Stallions game against Mountain View last week.
Andrew Sanduval passes around a defender during Stansbury's game against Mountain View last friday.
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Loading...Looking to win its first game of the season, the Stansbury Stallions boys basketball team faced off against the Mountain View Bruins at home.
Early on, Stansbury faced defensive pressure from the Bruins, which led to Stallions turnovers and contested shots that wouldn’t fall.
Despite stumbling out of the game in the first couple minutes, Stansbury responded by going on a 9-2 run to put Mountain View on its heels. It was the Bruins turn to falter, as unforced errors and squandered shooting chances allowed Stansbury to keep a wide advantage over Mountain View.
One of the contributing factors to the Stallions scoring run was the team’s three-point shooting and an overall outpacing and outhustling by the team as a whole. When the game’s first eight minutes drew to a close, Stansbury took a 19-9 lead into the second quarter.
The Bruins bounced back in the next period, answering the Stallions opening scoring outburst with one of their own. As the team began climbing back into the game, Stansbury started to struggle with hitting shots.
This enabled Mountain View to bring the score to a single possession and, after scoring the final two points of the half, cut Stansbury’s lead to 28-27 at the half.
As the final two quarters got underway, the Stallions found themselves unraveling at times as untimely fouls and poor shot decisions allowed the Bruins to take the lead and start pulling away with the game.
After extending the lead to double-digits in the last two minutes of the third quarter, Mountain View had the game firmly in its grasp and Stansbury found itself looking at the wrong end of a 39-52 score heading into the fourth.
The fourth quarter proved to be a tale of two strategies, as the Stallions’ success on their own interior was heavily outmatched by its interior defense at the Bruins’ end of the court. In spite of an improved inside game, Stansbury’s inability to contain Mountain View in the paint kept them from cutting into the lead and resulted in a 66-53 victory for the Bruins.
In the loss, three Stallions players scored in double figures, with Dillan Giles and Blake Hales posting 12 points apiece and Andrew Sanduval scoring 10.
With the two losses, Stansbury’s record drops to 0-6 as the team prepares to head into the winter break. Before the break, the Stallions faced Grantsville on Dec. 20 at Grantsville High School. The game took place after this week’s publication went to print.
