The final day of the Valley Center January Jam tournament proved to be just as frustrating and disappointing for the Garden City Buffalo boys as the previous two days had been.
That’s what happens when you are playing for seventh place against a talented Kansas City Turner team and come up on the short end of a 63-51 score. The Buffs returned home with an 0-3 tourney record and now are 6-6 overall.
That’s the situation Buffaloes’ head coach Jacy Holloway and his squad find themselves in, having dropped their last four games, and now have just a day to prepare for the Ulysses Tigers, a team that finished fourth in the same Valley Center event.
Tip-off Tuesday for the Buffs-Tigers game will be 7 p.m. at The Garden.
On Saturday, some of the same things that have plagued the Buffs in their recent downturn resurfaced.
The Buffs were out-rebounded 41-24 by the Golden Bears. The Buffs made only 21 of 56 shots (37.6 percent), and just 5 of 22 from 3-point range (22.7 percent), and they were only 4 of 10 from the line, one day after going 9 for 19 in an overtime setback to Coffeyville.
Defensively, the Buffs gave up 21 baskets inside the 3-point arc, including 17 in the paint. As a result, the Buffs were sliced by Turner’s shooters at a 27-of-54 clip (50 percent).
“It’s definitely disappointing,” Holloway said Sunday. “The tournament is tough. There’s a bunch of good teams. It was like an up-and-down roller-coaster in some ways.”
The Turner team was the same team that held a 19-point lead in Thursday’s opening round over eventual Jam champion Wichita Southeast. The Buffs had dropped a tough opener to Topeka Seaman, the other team playing in the finals.
“That’s how close we were in some ways,” Holloway said. “There were things in each of the three games that if we had done them just a little better, we would have won one or two of the games."
Saturday’s game saw the Buffs and Bears knotted at 13 at the end of the first quarter, before Turner went on a 19-10 scoring binge in the second to take a 32-23 lead into halftime.
In the third, the Buffs trailed by as many as 11, but closed the gap to five, 42-37, with just under two minutes left in the period. Two late buckets by the Bears, though, put them back on top 46-37bheading to the final stanza.
When Kyler Lamb’s bucket swished at the 4:50 mark, the Buffs were down only 50-46 and had regained some momentum. But over the final four minutes, the Buffs were outscored 13-5.
Demarcus Elliott was the only GCHS player in double figures, finishing with 13 points and a team-high six rebounds. Turner snapped a three-game losing streak and improved to 4-6. The Bears were led by Russel Reed’s 17 points, and Donald Rollen added 11.
Sexton moves
Since he recorded a double-double in the Buffs’ victory over Liberal on Jan. 9, the Buffs’ last win, they’ve been playing without senior Derrick Sexton.
The 6-3 senior, who had been coming off the bench and providing valuable minutes, moved to North Carolina due to a family employment opportunity.
“He had just begun to show his versatility in playing multiple positions,” Holloway said. “It’s really affected how we play the rest of the kids, when we rotate them in and out, and it’s taken some flexibility away from us, and I think it’s been a tough adjustment for the kids.”
With Ulysses arriving for the Tuesday game, Holloway said it will be imperative for his team to get back to playing the way they had right after the holiday break, when defensively they limited Great Bend and Liberal to low offensive outputs, forced turnovers and then were opportunistic on offense.
Contact Brett Marshall at bmarshall@gctelegram.com.