SACRAMENTO — Fans that flocked to Golden 1 Center for Saturday’s CIF Open Division championship were expecting to witness less of a basketball game and more of a coronation.
Who could blame them? Southern California champion Centennial hadn’t won a game by less than double digits since January and won by 24 in Tuesday’s regional final against a Sierra Canyon team led by Amari Bailey, ranked by ESPN as the No. 2 recruit in the country.
Modesto Christian gave the Huskies more than anyone bargained for, tying the game with three minutes left before Centennial (33-1) closed on an 11-2 run for a 59-50 victory, becoming just the second public school to win the Open Division title.
“There was no panic,” Huskies head coach Josh Giles said of his team’s mentality over the final three-and-a-half minutes. “I can’t share everything that was said in the timeout, but we rallied together.”
The Crusaders had overcome a 14-point deficit to tie the game at 46 and trailed by just two with the backing of a pro-NorCal crowd at the final TV timeout, then tied the game on two free throws after a Prince Oseya offensive rebound. But the Huskies showed why they were ranked as best team in the entire state and second-best team in the entire nation. New Mexico commit Donovan Dent gave Centennial the lead for good on a drive with 3:09 left, then doubled the lead with a clutch steal and layup 24 seconds later.
“We do a great job in walkthroughs and we kinda knew the play coming,” said Dent, who scored a game-high 21 points. “Once I saw him coming off the down screen, I was able to shoot the gap.”
Alex Argandar drew Dent’s fourth foul and made both free throws at the other end to trim the lead to 52-50, but Dent fed star junior Jared McCain for a 3-pointer and Ramsey Huff scored to extend the lead to seven after Modesto Christian (30-6) came up empty. Dent set up the exclamation point with a minute left, showcasing his handles in the lane before feeding Aaron McBride for a two-handed dunk that sealed the first state championship in any division in program history.
Centennial may not have a consensus top five player in his class like Bailey or the son of an NBA star like other SoCal powers, but all six of the Huskies’ players who saw the floor have legitimate aspirations to play at the next level. McCain, ranked by ESPN as the No. 22 junior in the nation, is a budding star in his own right, having already earned offers from big-name programs like Kansas and UCLA while showcasing an engaging personality that’s earned him a quickly-growing social media following. He scored 16 in the victory and went 3-for-5 from beyond the arc on a night where the Huskies made just five of their 16 long-range attempts.
“We didn’t shoot the ball nearly as well as we’ve shot it throughout the playoffs,” Giles said. “This is the first time we haven’t played at home in a month.”
The Huskies are no stranger to playing games on the grand stage, and McCain, who lived in Sacramento until age 13, had more friends and family in the crowd than any player on either team, but adjusting to an unfamiliar setting proved difficult for a Centennial team that had enjoyed home court throughout the Southern Section and state playoffs in a year where games were seldom played at neutral sites as a cost-cutting measure.
An early 11-3 lead and a 22-13 advantage after a quarter suggested the challenge of depth perception in an NBA arena was no issue, but the Huskies made just two of their final 14 attempts from deep. To make matters worse, the Congolese duo of Oseya and Manasse Itete powered Modesto Christian to 17 offensive rebounds and a 32-28 advantage on the glass, the first rebounding deficit Centennial faced in two months, and the Crusaders held a 14-7 advantage in second chance points.
Oseya, a wiry 6-foot-9 junior with an offer from Pacific to his name, struggled mightily in the first half to the tune of no points, four turnovers and a minus-14 mark, but his team got into the break down just 30-22.
“Obviously the first quarter was not our best quarter and we wish we could have that back,” Modesto Christian head coach Brice Fantazia said. “Early on, I think it wasn’t necessarily Centennial, no disrespect to them, but the lights and the big moment.”
As Oseya found his footing in the second half, opportunities were abound for both him and Itete, who scored on a putback and off one of Argandar’s four assists to cap off a 9-0 run that cut the lead to 36-31 midway through the third. Centennial led 46-35 after a blocked shot found its way to McCain for an open three, but sophomore Jamari Phillips drove to the basket in the final moments of the quarter to send his team into the fourth down by just nine.
Phillips, ranked by ESPN as the 18th-best sophomore in the nation, drew rave reviews for his 20-point performance, even as he shot an uncharacteristically poor 2-of-10 from 3-point land. One of those missed threes spurred perhaps his most impressive play of the night, as he grabbed his own rebound in stride and flew to the basket for a finger roll that cut the lead to five with 5:57 remaining. The Crusaders scored the first 11 points of the fourth quarter to tie it at 46, getting within three on Phillips’ one-handed transition dunk that brought fans out of their seats and drawing even for the first time since the opening tip on an Oseya and-1, with the rolling around the rim for what seemed like an eternity before it finally fell through.
A school of less than 350 students that’s typically the envy of much of the Central Valley, Modesto Christian had no shortage of support on the Sacramento Kings’ floor Saturday night, both from neighbors showing regional pride and an array of alumni including former Kentucky star Chuck Hayes, who flew in for the game.
“We may not have the biggest student section, but our overall support base is as good as anybody, and I think you heard that tonight,” Fantazia remarked.
The enthusiastic crowd and inspired showing against a team that most pundits expected to win by 20-25 points, if not more, certainly gave the Crusaders reason to hold their heads high, but there was no sense among Modesto Christian that the result was good enough.
“We expected to win this basketball game. That’s why it hurts so much,” Fantazia said. “I definitely think we surprised some people, but that’s not good enough for us.”
The narrative surrounding the Crusaders was that this season was just a warmup. Modesto Christian had just three seniors on the roster and Argandar was the only one to start. Darius Smith, who would have been the team’s top junior, missed the season with an ACL tear, as did Henoc Kabeya, a third Congolese player.
Fantazia said, “all year, I had reporters and people talking about next year, and I said, ‘why not this year?’”
As it turned out, this year nearly culminated in a state title for the Crusaders at the highest level. While almost all of their talent returns next season, the emotion Fantazia displayed in his postgame comments showed that the senior trio of Argandar, Zion Jones and Austin Moore will be missed.
“I’ve coached these guys since fifth grade,” the choked-up coach said. “We’ve got a lot of young guys with all the offers, all the accolades, and it’s hard for a senior to put his ego aside.”
Just as MC is expected to be a giant at the state level for years to come, Centennial could remain on top of the mountain as well. Dent and Huff, who battled foul trouble but defended Phillips, were the lone seniors on the roster.
“It’s been great for him to get the notoriety and the attention that I feel like he deserves.”
He does a lot of things for our team that maybe don’t get a lot of headlines, but you don’t win any kind of games without guys like Ramsey,” Giles said of Huff, who picked up his fourth foul in the final minute of the third quarter but stayed on the floor for all 32 minutes. “There was no way we could take him out. I have the utmost trust in him to get a stop, to make a big play and to get a big rebound.”
McBride and Devin Williams each scored 10 points for the Huskies, who used just six players but had four in double figures. Itete scored 11 for the Crusaders and BJ Davis finished with nine points and seven rebounds. He took a hard foul with 3:30 remaining but stayed in the game after the media timeout.
