Motivated Lynden boys bury Renton with third-quarter onslaught to snag Class 2A basketball regional victory
AUBURN, Wash, - The Lynden boys basketball team appears to be saving its best for last.
And that could mean trouble for the rest of the Class 2A tournament field.
Sixth-seeded Lynden certainly caused plenty of trouble for third-seeded Renton, as the Lions put away the Redhawks, 70-52, with a resounding third-quarter blitz in the regional round of the Class 2A state playoffs Friday night at Auburn Mountainview High School.
Lions’ junior wing Anthony Canales helped trigger a 39-6 run that spanned the latter half of the second quarter and carried into the third quarter. A 19-0 run to open the third quarter pushed the game out of reach for Renton as Lynden led by as many as 31 points midway through the fourth quarter.
“We know they are a good team, and they can make comebacks,” said Canales, who keyed the third-quarter burst with his overall play and finished with 23 points. “We emphasized if we go on a run, we can end it in the third quarter and we did that.”
Coston Parcher, Lynden’s senior point guard, buried a pair of 3-pointers, and Canales added another 3-pointer as the Lions went on a 19-point scoring binge to open the first 3:49 of the second half.
Parcher ran the Lions’ offense to near-perfection while finishing with 15 points.
“We just like playing our brand of basketball,” said Canales who tallied 17 points in the opening 19:06. “They gave us a 6-seed. We didn’t really care about it. We just wanted to let everyone know we’re the Lynden Lions.
“We never talk about defending [the state title]. We talk about hunting it. I would say in the third quarter, we played our best basketball all season, defensively and offensively.”
Renton, led by the 11 points of reserve Jordan Agosto, looked stunned by Lynden’s near-perfect start to the third quarter and never recovered.
“We lost to a good team tonight and they were ‘on’ tonight,” Renton coach Rashaad Powell said. “We didn’t do some of the things we needed to do. I thought [Lynden] played really tough and really hard. These experiences are things we need to have to grow as a team.”
Lynden (23-4) advances to the WIAA quarterfinals Thursday at 12:15 p.m. in the Yakima Valley SunDome. Renton (23-2) plays a loser-out round-of-16 state game on Wednesday at 9 a.m. in Yakima against Saturday’s Foss-Tumwater winner.
“We take pride in putting on the 'Green and Gold,'" Lynden coach Brian Roper said. “But we don’t feel like we are defending anything. We are pursuing something. It was a great third quarter by our kids. I didn’t expect a run quite like that.”
