HILLSBORO-Ore.-- No matter how hobbled he seemed or how much pain he felt, Clackamas junior Ben Gregg refused to let his team lose back-to-back games in the Les Schwab Invitational.
Down by as many as eleven points in the second half, Gregg helped bring the Cavaliers (3-2) all the way back as he scored 32 points and hauled in six rebounds to lead Clackamas to a 63-59 win over Battle Ground-Wash.
With the win, Clackamas will take on either Wilsonville or Lake Oswego in the consolation bracket semifinals.
“That shows amazing resilience,” Clackamas head coach Cameron Mitchell said. “After a tough loss, being a little down from yesterday, and being down ten, it would have been pretty easy for most teams to get routed. It just showed that our kids are mentally tough.”
Down two with just under eight seconds remaining, Battle Ground head coach Manny Melo designed a play with a screen flare for junior Nate Millspaugh with the option of hitting junior Kaden Perry on the roll, but Gregg read the play all the way and picked off the ball for an and-one play that sealed the win for Clackamas.
“I knew they were going to [Millspaugh],” Gregg said. “Kaden [Horsley], our point guard, took him so I just jumped the pass and luckily ended up getting the steal and the finish.”
Although playing through pain due to an inflamed muscle in his back, Gregg still finished as one of the games most impactful players, proving to those in attendance why he is a top-30 junior in the country according to ESPN.
The four-star prospect scored the Cavaliers first nine points and helped his team build an early lead before the Tigers (6-4) clawed back to tie the game at 13 at the end of one.
“He sucked it up,” Mitchell said. “He was tired and a little hurt at the end, but he pushed through.”
“In the last three minutes I just told him to bear down for three minutes and he made the final play to seal the game.”
It was in the second quarter that Clackamas seemed to lose its rhythm, and Battle Ground took full advantage.
Millspaugh, who finished the game with 22 points, knocked down multiple three-point baskets in the quarter while Gonzaga commit Kaden Perry, who finished with 24 points and 14 rebounds, got going as well.
But the eight-point halftime lead that the Tigers built wasn’t enough to sustain a furious Clackamas third-quarter rally in which the Cavaliers outscored the visitors by 11 behind a steady stream of timely shots and strong defensive play.
Millspaugh was relatively a non-factor in the second half as Mitchell schemed up ball-screen traps and double-teams to get the ball out of the guard’s hands while Gregg was able to deal with Perry relatively well throughout the night.
While Battle Ground rallied back in the fourth quarter and Clackamas kept the door open by missing a one-and-one opportunity which would have mostly put the game away with under ten seconds remaining, it wasn’t enough for the Tigers to make up for that disastrous third quarter.
“We have to want it,” Perry said. “That game we lost it ourselves. We weren’t doing the little things like boxing out and they took advantage of that.”
He added: “We just have to play basketball. There was a lot of stuff out there where I was like ‘wow.’ We weren’t playing hard and we gave up on some stuff. If we came ready to play then we would’ve played good basketball.”
After the game, Gregg said that while he has been in significant pain over the past few days, he wants to try and finish out the tournament.
If his first two games, in which he is averaging 25.5 points and 5.5 rebounds a game, are any indication, than he and Clackamas should do just fine.
“I knew if I thought about the pain it would just get worse so I tried to keep my mind off it, talk on defense, just not think about it and that’s what I did,” Gregg said.
