All Wires-d up: Chargers guard makes key defensive play to preserve victory in hometown

QUINCY — The experience was everything Ralph Wires could have hoped for.

To him, though, winning was the best part.

The Quincy High School graduate, now a freshman guard on the Carl Sandburg College men’s basketball team, helped the Chargers down John Wood Community College 73-67 on Wednesday in his first collegiate game in his hometown.

“It felt unreal to be honest,” Wires said.

Wires had about 60 friends and family members in attendance at JWCC’s Student Activity Center.

“The whole basketball team, lots of family, friends that I haven’t seen in a while,” Wires said.

Even with so many loved ones watching him play, he had one thing on his mind.

“A lot of people were talking about, ‘I can’t wait to come and see you,’ and stuff like that,” Wires said. “Seeing them is great, but the main thing I cared about was winning.”

In typical Wires fashion, his defensive exploits played a significant role in helping the Chargers seal their fifth win of the season. With 1:24 left in the second half and the Chargers leading 70-65, Wires swiped the ball from Trail Blazers sophomore forward Jake Wallingford on a drive to the basket then fired an outlet pass to Logan Sluder, who got fouled by Connor Watson while going in for a layup and made both free throws to push Carl Sandburg’s advantage to 72-65.

“Our game plan was to double (Wallingford),” said Wires, who had five points, five rebounds and an assist to go along with that steal. “He was getting to the rim and scoring as much as he wanted to for the most part. He turned his back, went to the rim, I stole it, and I looked up for one of my teammates.”

If the trends from the first half continued to the second, Wires and the Chargers likely would have had a much more comfortable lead in the final minutes. The Chargers jumped out to a 42-25 halftime lead by making eight 3-pointers, shooting 48.6 percent from the field and only turning the ball over twice.

“We weren’t pressuring the ball, and in the second half, we worked on that and shut them down a little bit,” Wallingford said.

The Trail Blazers rallied to get within three points twice in the second half, but they could never find the equalizer.

“We just couldn’t get that tying bucket, couldn’t get that stop, and we came up a couple buckets short,” said Wallingford, who had 21 points and 14 rebounds to record his seventh consecutive double-double.

The Trail Blazers first made it a one-possession game when Watson swished home a 3-pointer from the top of the key to trim the deficit to 69-66 with 2:49 left. A Sluder layup on the other end pushed the lead back to five.

After turning the ball over on the Trail Blazers’ next possession, sophomore guard Cachao Gianquinto Jr. stole Ethan Price’s inbounds pass and laid the ball up and in with 2:02 remaining.

Wallingford fouled Price 12 seconds later, and Price made both free throws to stretch the lead once more. The Trail Blazers’ only points the rest of the way came on a Wallingford putback layup with 17 seconds left, and the Chargers made five consecutive free throws in the final 1 minute, 50 seconds.

Trail Blazers coach Jonny Dahl said his team expended so much energy in their comeback attempt that they were running on fumes in the closing minutes.

“Those guys played so many minutes the second half and had to battle their tails off,” Dahl said. “They did everything they could. We just sort of ran out of gas. It wasn’t an effort thing in the second half, it was just we were beat.”

In addition to their defensive struggles, Dahl said the hole the Trail Blazers (4-9) dug themselves stemmed from their difficulty in solving the Chargers’ zone defense.

“It was poor planning on my part,” Dahl said. “I’ve got to have a better plan to attack the 3-2. I thought we would get a little bit of a different look in our spacing, but we just needed a middle touch and we weren’t getting it.

“In the second half, we were able to find stops but then we made a small adjustment on how we wanted to get middle touches, where we wanted to get the ball to go against the zone. We definitely did better. We were more efficient and got more flow out of it.”

A troublesome first half coupled with a second half in which the Trail Blazers outscored the Chargers 42-31 left Gianquinto wondering what could have been.

“We want that first half back, for sure,” Gianquinto said.

Wires will take the win, though.

“It felt great to do that,” Wires said.