Paul, Warren stands tall in win over Lake Forest

Watching Warren star guard Brandon Paul is always fun.

But on Tuesday night in their Waukegan sectional semifinal game against Lake Forest, Paul's teammates were enjoying themselves a little too much.

They watched as the Illinois-bound senior scored all seven of the Blue Devils' first-quarter points, and 11 of their 16 second-quarter points.

So at halftime, the message was clear.

And it came from fellow senior Jake Anderson, who starts at forward for the Blue Devils.

"Jake stepped up and he told everybody, 'We need to help Brandon out,'" Paul reported. "He said, 'We're not doing too much right now and Brandon's doing all the work. We need to help him out a little bit.'

"I think the other guys definitely keyed into that."

Particularly Anderson himself.

Anderson didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk in leading Warren to a 66-45 victory.

After having a scoreless first half, he came up big after the break, especially in the fourth quarter when Warren broke up a nip-and-tuck game that was tied at halftime.

As the Blue Devils ran off a 12-2 run at the start of the fourth quarter that extended their five-point lead to 15 points (50-35) with about four minutes left to play, Anderson was doing his best Brandon Paul imitation.

He scored 8 of the 12 points.

Top-seeded Lake Forest would never recover as No. 4 Warren rolled in a game that wasn't anything like the previous two games played between the teams during the regular season.

Warren and Lake Forest split their series in games that both went down to overtime.

The Blue Devils (23-5), who got a game-high 29 points, including two monster dunks, out of Paul, now advance to Friday's sectional championship game and will face the winner of today's semifinal game between No. 2 Waukegan (22-4), which will be playing with a reinstated Jereme Richmond, and No. 3 Zion-Benton (25-6).

Lake Forest, which capped off a magical regular season by winning the North Suburban Conference championship for the first time in more than 15 years, closes out with a 23-5 record.

"We usually tell ourselves that Brandon's going to get his 20 (points) every night and that me, David (Duncan) or James (Poliquin) or somebody has to step up and give a good 12 points. But in the beginning (Paul) was scoring everything for us and getting no help-.at all," said Anderson, who wound up with 10 points. "That was such a big factor. But a couple of us pulled together in the second half, got some buckets and helped him out."

The Blue Devils also got much better production out of Poliquin, Aaron Montgomery and reserve Ryan Maguire in the second half. Poliquin scored 8 of his 9 points after the break while Montgomery and Maguire both went scoreless in the first half but wound up with 6 and 5 points respectively.

"Our kids just played great in the fourth quarter with scores and stops," Warren coach Chuck Ramsey said. "We played a lot better tonight than we did in either of the first two games (against Lake Forest). We made better decisions. The first two games, we settled for too many threes and we didn't guard (Lake Forest guard Matt) Vogrich very well. Jake (Anderson) did an outstanding job guarding Vogrich tonight."

On top of working furiously to provide the Blue Devils with some additional second-half offense, Anderson worked the entire game to take Vogrich out of Lake Forest's offense.

Vogrich, who will be playing at Michigan next year and entered the game with a 22.3-point scoring average, finished with a team-high 15 points, but few of them came easily. Especially after the break.

Anderson clamped down and Vogrich connected on only 2-of-11 second-half field goal attempts. He also failed to score a bucket in the fourth quarter.

"We didn't move the ball as well as we did in the first two games, we didn't shoot the ball well and they did a really good job on Matt," said Lake Forest coach Phil LaScala, who also got 13 points out of Mitch Hopfinger. "Anderson played the best game I've seen him play all year. He really stepped up for them."

Vogrich had praise for Anderson, too.

"He's a great defender," Vogrich said. "He kind of kept me at a standstill the whole game and I never got any momentum going or anything.

"We did a lot of great things this season, just not as much as we wanted to in the post-season. We wanted a little bit more."