Dogie men are Even Steven

Sonja Karp
NLJ Sports Reporter
 
In a Seinfeld episode, Jerry remarked on the fact that he was “Even Steven”.  In every aspect of his life when something good happened, something else would happen that would be negative and would “even” him out.
The Dogies’ season so far seems to be life imitating art because after yet another weekend of splitting contests, they remain even on their season with a 5-5 record overall, a 2-2 record in conference and a 1-1 record in the quadrant.
A factor which may have played into the outcome of the weekend was that Dylon Tidyman, the Dogies’ leading scorer, sprained his ankle in practice early in the week so was out as the squad opened up quadrant play against Thermopolis on Friday and Buffalo on Saturday.
“Last weekend was a big one for us, and we knew that Thermopolis wasn’t going to be a cakewalk for us, especially on the road,” head coach Allen Von Eye began. “And then to get Buffalo here was really a best case scenario for our first meeting with them because playing at home gives you a little bit more confidence. So, having Dylon out was a little disappointing but we just had to deal with it and move on.”
The Dogies headed into Friday night’s matchup against the Bobcats in Thermopolis fully aware that the team would be putting their best effort forward. As Von Eye pointed out, the Bobcats understand they are at the bottom of the quadrant, that their best chance to be successful is to muddy up the game and force the Dogies to play within their system, and that their best opportunity to pick up quadrant wins would be against Newcastle and Douglas.
“We knew all of this going in and I tried to stress to kids how important it was to be ready,” Von Eye nodded. “We were missing one of our key players so that knocks us down a few pegs. First you subtract his 20 points per game, then add in all of the other things he does on the court, and the fact that his absence frees them up to bring more defensive pressure to Cade [Ostenson] and we had a lot of pieces missing.”
The Bobcats threw a junk defense against the Dogies where they focused on Ostenson with a box and one. Von Eye had planned for that, however he admitted he had not expected their overall defense to be as effective as it was.
Ostenson, who averages around 20 points per game was held to only eight due in a large part to having been double teamed the whole night. Fortunately, other Dogies stepped up to help fill in the gaps and the team’s defense was on point to give the squad the 37-31 point win.
Scoring was spread out pretty evenly with Kyle “Scrappy” Haslam leading the Dogies on the night with 11 points, followed by Ostenson with eight. Sawyer Roberson had six, Isaiah Brooks had five, Peyton Tystad finished with four and Dylan Talley rounded it out for his team with three.
With the win, the Dogies went to 1-0 in the quadrant, but were facing the Buffalo Bison, the number one team in 3A, for their second quadrant matchup on Saturday.
“Realistically, I knew we were going to miss Dylon more in this game than on Friday,” Von Eye admitted. “You have to have fire-power against a team like that. Buffalo is the number one seed for a reason because they have a lot of pieces that make them a good team.”
The Dogies started off the contest going toe-to-toe and holding their own, however, the juggernaut that is the Bison became too much as the contest wore on.
“We did a good job defensively, but they are physical and they present some matchup problems for us,” Von Eye declared. “Unfortunately, we let them get some buckets out in transition and you couple that with us taking the path of least resistance in the first half especially, and it makes it difficult to be successful.”
After pulling within four, the Bison went on a little run at the end of the second quarter to take a 29-21 lead going into the locker room. The Dogies came out strong in the third quarter, but hit a lull which Buffalo took advantage of to increase their lead to double digits by the time the fourth quarter began.
The Dogies made a run of their own to pull back within nine points, but the energy and effort put forth making up that difference appeared to gas the home team and Buffalo went on to take the win 72-48.
“You hate to take that loss, because we thought we played a better game than the score indicated,” Von Eye insisted. “But that makes us better and we can definitely learn from both games going forward.”
Ostenson was back on his game finishing with 28 points, and Haslam had another good night with 11 of his own.
The Dogies have another tough weekend coming up as they travel to Douglas on Friday and host Wheatland on Saturday.