Livingston boys basketball lose, but will play for ABC title

Ricardo Aguilar calls himself a superstitious man.

That’s why his Livingston High boys basketball team exited the locker room with a combination of basketball uniform and dress shoes. Aguilar was trying anything to erase the bad mojo from Friday night’s Atwater-Buhach Colony Tournament basketball game at the Nest.

The Wolves opened the tournament with an impressive victory over host Atwater on Thursday but couldn’t find a rhythm on either end of the court in Friday’s 55-43 loss to Elliot Christian.

Despite the setback, Livingston will still play in today’s championship game against defending champion Roosevelt. The tip is set for 3:30 p.m. All three teams on the Wolves’ side of the bracket went 1-1, making the tiebreaker points against. Livingston yielded just 95 points in its two games as opposed to Atwater‘s 114 and Elliot Christian’s 115.

“We were all down in the locker room when the Atwater coach came in and told us we’d be playing in the championship,” forward Harman Singh said. “We all just laughed. Our goal as a team is to just be better than we were the day before. We’ll need to be better in the championship.”

After averaging 25 points per game coming into the contest, the Eagles (5-2) did everything they could defensively to take Singh away from the Wolves. The ploy worked, at least for a half, as Singh was limited to six points at the break.

The rest of the Wolves (2-5) struggled to fill the scoring void, shooting just 4 for 19 from the field in the first half. Elliot Christian began taking advantage, opening the second quarter with a 12-3 run behind David Lerma (game-high 19 points) and Jimmy Beltz (15).

Livingston closed the half with five consecutive points to go into intermission down just 23-17, but the Eagles countered with an 11-2 run to open the second half, all but putting the game out of reach.

Singh (game-high 19 points and 10 rebounds) and Gabe Deol (11 points) got going in the second half, but never got the Wolves any closer than seven the rest of the way.

“I don’t think we were mentally ready to play Elliot tonight,” Aguilar said. “We’ve struggled with consistency, even within the game, and if we can’t turn that around we’re going to have some good games followed by some bad ones.

“The good news is our defense did enough to get us into the championship and we have an opportunity to be better than we were tonight.”

This story was originally published December 12, 2014 at 11:39 PM with the headline "Livingston boys basketball lose, but will play for ABC title."