Shelton 56-39

Yavneh defeated Dallas’s Shelton School 56-39 Tuesday night. The win improves the Bulldogs record to 17-4 to finish calendar year 2013.

Senior Captain followed up his heroic performance 1214 miles away Tuesday by breaking not one but two Yavneh all-time assist records with some major help from classmate Posts Itai Guttman and Adam Schor. Yavneh jumped out of the gate with an early 4-0 lead behind a Guttman to Kleinman connection and extended to 11-3 when Adam Steinbrecher bottomed a corner triple. From there, however, the Baltimore jet lag seemed to kick in. A quick 7-0 Shelton run was the result of some sloppy turnovers against the 3-2 zone defense coupled with extremely tentative play on both ends of the court. The Bulldogs maintained a 13-10 lead after one period of play as both teams shot 31% from the field. As the Shelton spurt reached 11-2 early in the second quarter, the lead finally changed hands. Yavneh needed a lightning bolt of energy but instead they got Junior Noah Weiss. Weiss threw a seeing-eye pass to Kleinman that re-captured the lead for the Bulldogs and then he blended another fantastic feed to Schor to secure a 21-20 halftime advantage. In a strange statistical first half, both teams continued to shoot exactly 33% from the field, have at least as many offensive rebounds as defensive rebounds, and display the very worst offense since a game in March of 1863. Somehow Yavneh managed 8 turnovers against a passive 3-2 zone in the process.

The Bulldog post duo of Itai Guttman and Adam Schor decided that one half of sluggishness was all there would be on this night. Sam Kleinman, who clearly had signed too many autographs over the previous 68 hours, also showed up to the third quarter party. He dished quick helpers to both big men, including a nice Itai Guttman reverse layup for a 25-21 lead. Shelton once again uglied the game with a 7-2 run to surge back into the lead but Kleinman and the bigs had a response. Another assist to each post player followed by a Schor tip-follow made up a 6-0 run that eventually ended the third period as 10-0 and a 9-point Bulldog advantage. Guttman had his most dominant stretch all season long with 8 straight points in the game bridging the 3rd and 4th periods. He was having so much fun that he used a second chance buzzer beater of his own miss to complete the third quarter. Adam Karnett’s steal created a Schor layup to break up the Itai Guttman Show and make the score 41-30 for the first double-digit lead of the night. Meanwhile, Kleinman just kept on finding the big men all second half long. Schor completed a nice three point play for 46-32, Adam Steinbrecher found Karnett for his craftiest basket in a couple games, and then Schor volleyball-tipped a crazy shot into the basket to blow the game open at 50-34. Kleinman almost recorded a Yavneh single game record-tying 12th assist on a well-executed missed layup with minor contact but moments later tied and broke the record on a pair of Jason Epstein finishes. With Epstein’s layup under and around a blocked shot attempt, Kleinman not only set the single game record for assists with 13 but also moved into first on the career assist list with 388. Adam Schor led all scorers with a monstrous 23 point/16 rebound game, Itai Guttman added 16 points/7 assists of his own, and Kleinman with the 13 assists created it all.

Yavneh (17-4) will now re-group until early-January when they begin district play in TAPPS for the first time in 14 years. The Bulldogs will start 2014 with one final tuneup within the orange walls of Celina Public High School. An emotional final week of the semester caps a really successful start but the biggest basketball games have yet to be played for Yavneh Academy. Will the emergence of Sam Kleinman as a budding great Bulldog superstar be the piece to the puzzle that makes this team rise to the next level? Will the big man duo of Guttman and Schor become impossible to contain?—is Noah Weiss ready to put a Big Three discussion back on the table? Will Adam Karnett finish his illustrious career with yet another scoring spurt to make this team unbeatable? Will the countless guard/small forward depth not just continue to wear down teams but start to punish them? Which David Rudomin and Ori Guttman will show up in 2014?

ONLY TIME WILL TELL!!!

The Kennel Report, now in its tenth season, has been written by…

Zack Pollack M&M

TL-BW-SP-BR