Burlington Central stays unbeaten in BN-East

Burlington Central's boys basketball team kept its Big Northern East mark unblemished Tuesday night after its 71-57 win over Richmond-Burton, but the old "tale of two halves" cliché might've best described the Rockets' eighth-straight win.

After building a 22-point halftime lead behind Ethan Mayfield's 15-point first half and a 55 percent clip from the field, the Rockets (18-2, 7-0), led by Ryan Fitzgerald's game-high 21 points and 7 rebounds, saw a 24-point cushion in the third slashed in half by a hot hand from Richmond-Burton with 4 minutes left in the fourth.

"Maybe we relaxed a little bit," said Mayfield, who scored 11 first quarter points and finished with 3 steals. "After they went on (a 21-8 run bridging the third and fourth quarters), I told the team the game wasn't over."

"We weren't making smart decisions with the ball," Fitzgerald said. "But like (coach Brett Porto) told us, it's better to learn from a win than a loss."

Central tallied 10 turnovers in the second half, with 7 coming in the fourth that did raise the blood pressure. Fortunately, the Rockets' big first half gave enough cushion to absorb the 42-point second half by R-B, and a 15-for-19 clip from the charity stripe iced any comeback attempt for R-B (8-13, 1-5).

"They almost chipped it down to single digits so that was something we were concerned about," Porto said. "But we did just enough at the free throw line and just enough defensively in the fourth quarter to get it back to double digits.

R-B's Blaine Bayer and Jakob Kaufman poured in 14 points each while Mark Marzahl and Jared Miller each added 10 points off the bench. Bayer was held scoreless in the first half and scored 12 of his total in the third as R-B totaled just 15 at the half on 24 percent shooting, all thanks to 9 first half turnovers that Burlington's stifling defense converted into 10 points.

"We played out of our minds in the first half," R-B coach Brandon Creason said of his teams' 16 turnovers. "We were throwing the ball all over the place, throwing up the first shot we had. But in the second half I thought we did a good job of letting our offense come and getting the right guys the ball. The lead was just too big."

A big reason behind that lead was that Central pounded the paint for 46 points. After Mayfield's steal for a layup to end the first quarter for a 17-6 advantage, BC raced out to a 16-4 run that ended with a Ta Vontae Harris steal and a Luke McCurdy layup for a 33-10 lead with 3 minutes left in the half. Harris finished with 9 points, 7 assists, 5 rebounds and 3 steals while Zach Schutta added 10 points and 2 steals as BC shot 56 percent overall. The ending, however, provided the Rockets a lesson.

"We just got a little loose with the ball," Porto said. "When the game got physical like that we'd like to make more two-foot decisions, with the basketball, just be a little bit more fundamentally sound with everything."