Comeback kids

Scott Morrison said he considered leaving at halftime.

And really, who could blame the Lakehead Thunderwolves men’s basketball coach?

Down 21 points to the top scoring team in the OUA, a team that looked like it could sink a shot from anywhere they pleased, Morrison said he challenged his starters at the break, giving them one last chance to proved they deserved to be on the court.

Slowly, but surely, they did, erasing the deficit on a Ryan Thompson three-pointer and taking the lead for good on his second straight from behind the arc, an improbable 90-84 win for the ages over the Laurier Golden Hawks.

“We just had to stay positive. I think that’s the main thing,” said Thompson, who also hauled in several key rebounds that kept the potent Hawks offense from doing what it does best.

“We knew we could work hard, but we just didn’t play well in the first half. We didn’t work hard enough. They outworked us, out-rebounded us, pretty much outdid everything. We just had to come back stronger and harder at halftime.”

One thing the Wolves never did was give up said Thompson, who finished with 16 points and seven boards.

“You never go into the half thinking you don’t have a chance. Otherwise, that’s just the end of it,” he said. “We definitely thought we had a shot and we knew if we played our game we could come back.”

Thompson may have gotten the winning points, but he wouldn’t have had the opportunity were it not for sparkplug guards Jamie Searle and Venzal Russell putting them in position to complete the comeback.

Down 11 with less than five minutes to go in the fourth, Russell stole the ball and raced down the court, an easy lay-up that made it 79-70 for Laurier.

A minute later another Russell steal led to a Searle three-pointer and the gap was six. Searle promptly buried another trey.

OUA leading scorer Kale Harrison, held to just 10 points, turned the ball over on a traveling call. Russell responded with a deuce to pull Lakehead within one, the closest they’d been since the first quarter.

Laurier’s Maxwell Allin put an end to the Wolves 13-0 run to restore a three-point Hawks lead, but then Thompson took over and worked his long-distance magic.

Searle said the players responded to Morrison’s halftime challenge, knowing a slow start would see the bench open up and playing time dwindle for the starters.

“He told us we’ve got seven or eight guys who can come in off the bench and play. He told the starters that we’ve got two or three minutes to show that we want to work and that we want this win. If not we’d have been buried on the bench,” Searle said. “And we wanted it.”

With so much on the lines, the fifth-year guard said he’s not sure he’s ever been part of a comeback that means so much. The Wolves (9-3) grabbed solo second in the OUA West with the win, two points up on Laurier (8-4).

“This was huge. We needed this to stay in the hunt, to stay at the top of the standings. It would have been nice to have won the (season’s) split, but we’re happy and just have to move forward from that one,” said the Belleville, Ont. native, who finished with a game-high 23 points. 

Morrison would just as soon forget the first half, which saw the Hawks go on a 19-3 run, hit 10 of 15 three-pointers and control the play at both ends of the court.

Kyle Enright, Travis Berry and Conor Buckley all hit a pair of threes for Laurier, who owned three separate 23-point leads in the second quarter and led 56-35 at the half.

“It’s kind of bittersweet to me, because I was a little disappointed at the first half. Now I feel like we just escaped, which is great. But the second half shows what we’re capable of when we are all giving our best effort. Hopefully that’s the message we’re going to take from this game,” said Morrison, who only used six players in the second half.

There was no Knute Rockne inspired halftime speech that drove them to victory, he added.

“I ran out of things to say, to be honest. I went in there and said I have no more gimmicks to throw out there. There’s no more ways I can teach it, we just have to start doing the things that we practice every week, but have a little bit more urgency about ourselves.”