BUFFALO – Justin Greene was scoring at will inside. Nick Walsh couldn’t miss from outside. The tandem helped give the New York City men’s open basketball team a 15-point halftime lead against its rivals from Long Island.
The second half, though, was a completely different story. Led by former Christ the King standout Chris Martin, Long Island talked the talk and walked all over NYC in the second half, rallying for a 87-76 win in a heated affair at the steamy Koessler Athletic Center on the campus of Canisius College.
“Our guys got caught up playing one-on-one basketball, we stopped sharing the ball, stopped making the extra pass and stopped playing defense,” NYC coach Allen Griffin said. “When you do that, any team in the country is going to catch up and probably beat you.”
Once the dominant team of the Empire State Games, New York City is 0-2 in the competition and is hoping to avoid getting swept out of the 2010 Games Saturday.
“We don’t want to leave here with no wins,” Greene said. “I’ve got too much pride. I’m already upset right now about this loss.”
Greene, the former Lincoln standout who is now a rising junior at Kent State, scored a team-high 22 points, Walsh, a rising senior at Manhattan College, added 20. Chaz Williams, a Hofstra transfer who will play at UMass, had 13 and Travis Nicholls, a rising sophomore at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, added 10 for NYC, which led by as many as 18 in the first half.
“The first half we weren’t sharing the ball, we weren’t getting back [on defense],” Martin said. “We came in at halftime and said let’s move the ball, get stops and make some shots.”
Long Island, especially Martin, a rising senior at Stony Brook, and Hofstra’s Cornelius Vines, did just that. The guards torched NYC, scoring more than half of Long Island’s points. Martin and Vines, who both got into it verbally with Akeem Bennett and Walsh, respectively, scored 23 points apiece. Vines scored all of his points after halftime, including back-to-back 3-pointers in a 10-0 run that put Long Island (1-1) in front, 63-58, midway through the second half.
“They tried to get us out of our game and we kind of fell into it a little bit,” Walsh said. “We let them come back into the game and I think we were a little tired at the end of the game on ‘D’ and they slowly started knocking down open shots and that’s how they got back into the game.”
NYC came back to tie the score at 74 on a pair of free throws by Greene, who was slowed by Long Island’s double-team in the second half. But David Coley, an incoming freshman at Stony Brook and former Jefferson standout, buried a 3-pointer for three of his 14 points, to put Long Island in front for good with just under five minutes remaining.
“It wasn’t just doubling me, a lot of my shots weren’t falling in the second half,” Greene said. “We played hard, we competed, but they came back. You have to give them all the credit in the world. Hopefully we can come back tomorrow and get a win.”