BURLINGAME, Calif. — What does an offense do when the other team has a 6-foot, 9-inch center hovering underneath the basket, daring you to challenge him in the post?
For Burlingame on Wednesday night, the answer was, “keep bombing 3-pointers.”
The Panthers hit nine of them against Half Moon Bay as they avenged a mid-January loss to the Cougars, pulling out a back-and-forth, 50-48 victory in their home gym.
“That’s also who we are. When we’re playing at our best, we are hitting those 3s and we’re looking for each other,” Burlingame head coach David Lopez said. “We have a lot of guys who can get downhill, and we also have guys who can shoot the ball, so it’s the best combination of both worlds. It’s been a while since we really played team basketball. Tonight, our scoring was pretty spread out.”
No Panther scored more than David Parrot’s 11 points, but Max Robenalt added 10, Lucca Maher had nine and Jean-Luc Uharriet chipped in with eight. Lucca’s older brother, senior center Rowan Maher, found himself in early foul trouble with three in the first quarter, so Burlingame (14-7, 6-4 PAL-Bay) ran a five-out offense for most of the night.
Maher had the unenviable task of tangling with Half Moon Bay’s Owen Perez, who moves well for a player of his size and kept the paint off-limits for much of the game. Half of the Panthers’ made field goals came from outside the 3-point line, and five of their nine 3s came from bench players, with Robenalt hitting three and sophomore Scott Cornelius nailing two.
“Max was a sophomore on varsity last year; Scott is a sophomore on varsity this year,” Lopez said. “Those two guys are going to be really big guys for us next year, and they’re big guys for us right now. When they can provide that off the bench for us, it changes our team completely and the dynamic of who we are. Kudos to them for really sticking with it and getting ready for these big moments. They probably hit the five biggest shots of the game.”
The Cougars (13-8, 7-2) saw their star guard, Gio Garduño-Martin, get off to a hot start with 11 of his game-high 23 points in the first quarter. He also set Half Moon Bay’s all-time school scoring record and now has 1,529 points — surpassing his head coach, John Parsons, a 2002 graduate who scored 1,512.
But outside of Garduño-Martin and Perez, who added 14 points, the Cougars’ secondary scorers failed to step up. The rest of the roster combined for just 11 points, and Garduño-Martin had Half Moon Bay’s only two made 3-pointers, both in the first half.
Garduño-Martin did make five straight free throws to tie the game at the end of the third quarter, but big 3-pointers by Cornelius and Uharriet helped Burlingame reclaim the lead in the fourth. The Panthers were just 3-for-7 at the foul line before Uharriet hit two big ones in the closing seconds to make it a two-possession game. That rendered Perez’s tip-in just ahead of the final buzzer irrelevant.
“(I wasn’t) really thinking about much,” Uharriet said. “To end practices, we do a lot of free throw shooting, so just going back to that, trusting the reps and trusting myself and the work I’ve put in to knock those down.”
In the teams’ earlier meeting in Half Moon Bay on Jan. 14, Burlingame was outscored 25-8 in the first quarter and could not dig itself out of that hole. Lucca Maher had 27 points and Uharriet added 18 in that game, and while the Cougars kept those two mostly in check in the rematch, the Panthers’ other scorers stepped up Wednesday, as did their efforts on the defensive end.
Burlingame is at Sequoia on Friday night, while Half Moon Bay visits Carlmont. The Cougars must win out and get some help in order to catch Menlo-Atherton for the Bay Division title.
