Palatine prevails in coaches' reunion meeting

Saturday's night's nonconference boys basketball game at Palatine High School was a reunion of the two head coaches.

Vernon Hills' Matt McCarty and Palatine's Eric Millstone were once the freshman A and B coaches at Palatine.

On this night, they were directing their respective varsity squads in a battle that went down to the wire before the Pirates posted a 46-44 triumph behind the balanced scoring of senior forward Mykyta Cheshko (13 points), sophomore guard Michael Orris (11) and senior forward Tommy Galvan (10).

Both teams had multiple leads but Palatine (9-15) went ahead for good when Orris made a big drive through the lane and scored a layup for a 38-37 lead with 3:55 left.

Cheshko and Galvan each hit 3-pointers in the next two minutes as the lead grew to 44-38 with 1:49 remaining.

"There was a 3-pointer there we where left the shooter unguarded and they took advantage," McCarty said. "They never looked back after that."

The Cougars (16-7) battled back to within 44-41 on a 3-pointer by Chris Argianas (9 points) with 1:23 left.

A free throw by senior Nat Pearson made it 45-41 with 23 seconds left before the Cougars got back to within when Chris Morgan (10 points) hit 1 of 2 free throws with 11.1 seconds left.

Galvan made 1 of 2 free throws with 8.4 seconds to make it 46-42 before Brian Berzanski's rebound layup with one second left completed the scoring.

The Cougar, who lost to North Suburban Conference Prairie Division leader North Chicago 105-72 the night, are averaging 60 points a game.

"Matt (McCarty) is doing a lot of good things there," Millstone said. "To hold them to 44 points, we did a pretty nice job defensively."

Junior guard DaVaris Daniels, who averages 20 points, scored 11.

"They did a nice job on him," said McCarty, whose team was led by senior Brandon Curry's 12 points.

"I thought Michael Orris did a good job defending him (Daniels)," Millstone added. "We challenged him (Saturday) afternoon to step his game up defensively and to hold a player like Daniels to 11 points is a credit to Michael."

Millstone credited his bench in helping fuel the victory.

"Those kids of the bench (Chad Bobbit, Tommy Johlie and Jake Velinski) gave us good minutes and filled their roles," he said.

"When we distribute the ball like we did this game, we get pretty good results. It's fun going against Matt. You always enjoying coaches against your buddies."

The Pirates travel to Conant on Friday.

"They beat us here by a good margin the last time so we needed to get some momentum from a game like this." Cheshko said.

"It was good to finally get on track defensively. We needed to make some stops after half. Teams have been coming out and scoring against us then so we needed a lot of stops in the third quarter."

McCarty called Cheshko the X-factor.

"If he'd scored between 10 and 15 points against us, I thought they'd be tough to beat," McCarty said. "And sure enough, he got 13. We didn't do a good job on him. I thought Robert Bryant did a nice job on the glass for us (team-high 12 rebounds)."

McCarty felt there were six or seven possessions where the Cougars couldn't figure out what to do against the Pirates' pressure defense.

"And they took advantage of that," the coach said. " We've proven all along when we don't score in there 60s, we don't win."

Cheshko said the Pirates are best when they have three or four players in double figures.

"We're not going to score 60 points every game," he added. "We're scoring in the 40s most of the time. So when everyone can get some points for us, that's when we're at our best."

The Pirates proved that Saturday.