BOURBON - Scoring seemed easy Friday for Triton High School's boys basketball team.
Shooting 63 percent from the field, the Class 1A No. 3 Trojans (16-3) picked up their 11th-straight win, beating the visting Tippecanoe Valley Vikings 51-35 (7-11) in nonconference action.The night began by honoring Triton's senior basketball players, managers, cheerleaders, lifters and band members. Once the game started, senior Griffyn Carpenter kept the celebration going, scoring 10-first quarter points en rout to 19 in the game.
"He did it in a lot of different ways too," Triton coach Jason Groves said about Carpenter, the program's all-time leading scorer with 1,206 points. "He's posting up, he's popping out - he's just scoring in so many different ways. I think he's starting to get it. He's understanding that his time is limited here at Triton. He's definitely taking advantage of it."
Carpenter started the game scoring 10 of his team's first 12 points, many of which came off layups, much to the chagrin of Tippecanoe Valley coach Bill Patrick.
"We let him have the ball in a position where he was going to hurt us," Patrick said.
Scoring 1.13 points per possession, a lot of Triton's points came from close range.
"They got a lot of shots in the lane early," Patrick said. "In the first half, our defense broke down a lot of times. They're athletic, but there's no reason we should give up easy shots in the paint, which we did."
Along with the strong Triton offense, the defense was also solid, forcing Valley to use almost a minute of clock on numerous occasions before taking a shot.
"We talk about our defense sparking our offense a lot of times," Groves said. "That's where we're going to be consistent, night-in and night-out, on defense. I thought our kids did that tonight. They came in and played some good, solid fundamental defense."
Along with Carpenter's production, sophomore Clay Yeo matched him, as both went 8 of 12 from the field for 19 points.
"Clay played with so much more purpose tonight," Groves said about the 6-foot-5 Yeo, who also had six assists and five rebounds. "He was focused, he executed things we wanted done. I could tell he was ready to go. He's going to be a great player."
Valley also has a strong core of young players, led by sophomore Nick Kindig and freshman Tanner Andrews.
Against Triton, Kindig led the Vikings with 14 points, but Andrews struggled, scoring four points on 2-of-10 shooting.
Early on, all of Valley's offense was generated from Kindig, who scored eight first-quarter points, to keep his team within striking distance.
"We lost him a couple of times in our half-court traps, so we kind of went man-to-man to lock up on him," Groves said about defending the sharp-shooting Kindig. "I thought our bigs did a nice job on Andrews. We kind of focused on him a little bit in practice this week. We kind of worked on some of the moves he likes to make and tried to take those away in practice. I thought Austin (Davis) and Blake (Lemler) did an awesome job on him."
Scoring eight of his team's first 10 points, Kindig had Valley within 12-10 with a minute to go in the first quarter, but a 12-0 Triton run over the next four minutes built a lead Valley couldn't recover from.
"I think we're good enough to play with them," Patrick said. "We just didn't play well."
With two sophomores and two freshmen in the starting lineup, the Vikings have had some growing pains and have limited the amount of options Patrick has had this year.
"You just can't change the defenses and do things you'd like to do," Patrick said. "Hopefully next year, we'll be able to do those things."
Triton travels to Argos Monday, while Valley's next contest is Tuesday at home against Maconaquah.
