STUDIO CITY — For some, 13 is an unlucky number.
For Trent Perry, it was a good omen Saturday night.
The Harvard-Westlake star point guard attempted 13 free throws and made all 13, including two of them with 3.8 seconds left in the game on his way to a 40-point performance to help lead his team to a 73-72 victory over Carlsbad in the CIF SoCal Regional Open Division semifinals.
“I didn’t want to lose,” said Perry, who had seven rebounds and five assists to go along with his 40 points. “Not just for me, but for the other seniors, the juniors, everyone on the team who works so hard. I couldn’t let them down.”
“He just made a decision that we weren’t going to lose,” Harvard-Westlake head coach David Rebibo said. “When he’s locked in like that, it carries over. They’re kids and you know they’re going to have good nights and bad nights and off nights, but he responded and the rest of the guys followed and we got through it.”
With Harvard-Westlake down by eight points at halftime, Perry kicked it into high gear, scoring 13 points in the third quarter to bring the Wolverines and Lancers to a tie at the end of the frame.
While Perry was elevating the offense in the third quarter, the Wolverines keyed in on defense too, holding the Lancers to 11 points in the quarter after giving up 41 in the first half.
“Basketball is a team game. It wasn’t just one guy, the entire team locked down on defense,” Perry said. “The first half was a struggle, but as a team we just came together.”
For as well as Harvard-Westlake played in the second half, that antithesis was true in the first two quarters.
Carlsbad came out with a higher level of energy and sense of urgency that Harvard-Westlake struggled to match.
Tony Duckett, Jake Hall and Euan Davis each scored nine points in the first half, and big man Jael Martin had seven points with a handful of blocks.
A 3-pointer by Duckett in the second quarter gave Carlsbad a 30-19 lead, as the…
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