Brenton Mills PG’19 made 21 points against Nobles to help lead the team to the victory.
With two people on him, Brenton Mills PG’19 slammed home a breakaway dunk against Nobles on Saturday. Mills led the team in scoring with 21 points, had no fouls, and shot 100 percent from the free-throw line. Ultimately, Andover Boys Basketball bounced back from its close loss against Loomis the night before, beating Nobles by a final score of 70-48.
According to Jack Penney ’21, Mills was the standout player of Saturday’s game.
Penney said, “He made a lot of good shots, and he had that great dunk too. He made a lot of plays when we were down too, like in the first half to get us back into the game to eventually be in the lead at halftime by two.”
Nobles came on strong the first half, but Andover was able to take control in the second half by exploiting its opponent’s weak play in the paint, according to Penney.
“Their main weakness is that they didn’t really have any big post players, so they couldn’t really get inside. They were limited to just shooting and by the second half they couldn’t really make their shots.”
Penney added that defense was, and will continue to be, a large component in its play.
“Going into the game, we were really focused on our defense. The game before, when we played against Loomis, we played pretty well offensively but our defense was not very good. Our big focus for this game was to clamp down on defense. We played a lot better because we only let up 17 points in the second half, so I think we reached our goal of playing better defense.”
On January 25, the team played away at Loomis. With five seconds remaining, Loomis stole the ball on offense and put in a layup as time expired, handing Andover a 82-80 loss.
Andover also lost to Tilton 77- 58 at home on Wednesday. With the loss, Andover’s record moved to 10-6.
According to Nick Thomas ’21 and Co-Captain Matteo Whelton ’20, the team kept good morale despite coming short of a win.
Thomas said, “In the beginning we were just firing shots back and forth with them. That’s when we were playing like ourselves.”
Andover will play at Thayer on Friday
