Falmouth sets sail in second half, defeats Salem boys hoop in D2 EMass final

BOSTON – The unlikely ride for the Salem boys basketball team came to a screeching halt Monday on the parquet floor of TD Garden.The Witches played suffocating defense in the first half of their Division 2 Eastern Mass. final against Falmouth, holding the Clippers to 5-of-28 shooting. Then the wheels came off the proverbial wagon.Falmouth flew out of the locker room and exploded for 48 second-half points, 42 of them coming from the powerful duo of John Lavin and Nelson Baptiste, as the Clippers took a 62-55 win and earned a trip to Worcester on Saturday for the state finals.”We did a great job on defense in the first half,” Salem coach Tommy Doyle said. “And I don’t know if it was because we got worn down or something else, but we didn’t do the job on defense in the second half to win the game.”The Clippers’ (20-5) paltry shooting resulted in coach Paul Lundberg not reading the riot act to his team, but instead taking a relatively simple approach.”I told them that we had 16 minutes left and to settle down and just start playing,” Lundberg said. “Our defense was OK, we just couldn’t get a bounce or anything to go in.”With Salem’s (18-7) focus squarely on stopping Baptiste on the outside, it left a hole for Lavin to exploit. And Lavin did so in the third quarter, scoring 16 points as the Clippers turned a 20-14 deficit into a 37-29 lead thanks to a devastating 23-9 run.”We went in happy knowing that we had played our best ball of the year and we were only down six,” Lavin said. “We knew that we could step up and play our game and win.”Baptiste then played the role of executioner on Salem’s hopes in the fourth quarter.His basket early in the final period extended the lead to 41-30 before Antonio Reyes tried to put the Witches on his back and carry them back.He rattled off five straight points to cut the lead to 43-37 with just over four minutes left as he finished with a team-high 22.”Antonio’s been doing that for us all year,” Doyle said. “He’s given us what we’ve needed at a lot of times.”Baptiste and Lavin, though, were able to keep the Witches at arm’s length down the stretch.Reyes would pull Salem within six at 47-41 before the Clippers began to salt the game away from the foul line. Baptiste and Lavin would hit their freebies in the final minutes as Salem could get no closer than the six-point margin the rest of the way.”We finally started to get some bounces in the second half,” Lundberg said.Both teams were cold as ice to start the game, playing through an ugly first quarter that saw the Witches lead 9-4. Salem began to heat up a bit in the second, pushing the lead to 16-6 on a Reyes three while the Clippers were stuck in a 2-for-15 shooting slump.Falmouth would gain a small foothold in the final moments of the second, cutting the lead to six at the half. Lavin then went to town at the start of the third, scoring seven straight points to put his team in front for good.