DUBLIN — De La Salle survived Friday night.
Barely.
Dublin battled and battled to give itself a chance to win this East Bay Athletic League showdown and almost delivered. But its last shot from beyond the 3-point arc as time expired did not fall.
De La Salle prevailed 46-43 in a game the Spartans led after moving in front with a big run to start the second quarter but could never get comfortable.
Credit Dublin.
The Gaels played terrific defense all game but weren’t able to find much offense until the final quarter.
Once Dublin heated up, the game turned into a nail-biter.
Evan Bautista’s 3-pointer pulled the home team to within 43-40 with 30.3 seconds left. After Arshawn Salkhi made 1 of 2 foul shots for De La Salle with 27.2 seconds to go, Bautista buried another 3-pointer to cut the margin to 44-43.
Sophomore Ibrahim Monawar made two free throws with 17.3 seconds left to stretch De La Salle’s advantage to 46-43, setting up the wild finish.
Damase Coly’s 3-point attempt for Dublin from the wing, which would have tied the score, missed.
De La Salle star Alec Blair then had a shot to ice the game at the free-throw line. He missed two, grabbed the offensive rebound, and missed two more.
Braddock Kjellesvig grabbed the offensive rebound for De La Salle, but Dublin forced a turnover in a frantic final sequence, giving Bautista a chance to extend the game to overtime with a 3-point attempt from the top of the arc.
The shot missed.
Game over.
De La Salle — ranked second by the Bay Area News Group — improved to 18-3 overall and 4-0 in the EBAL.
Dublin, ranked seventh, is 17-4, 3-1.
“I can’t promise you that we’re going to be perfect because we’re not,” said Blair, who finished with 15 points. “We’re going to miss. But we’re going to make up for it. We’re going to play our tails off and try our best to win the game. I thought down the stretch we played really hard, showed some grit and got the win.”
Kjellesvig, a 6-foot-6 junior transfer from Christopher, led De La Salle with 16 points, 12 before halftime. Leo Ricketts added eight points.
Jalen Stokes had 13 points and Cameron Anderson added 10 points for Dublin, which also got nine points from Bautista, all on 3-pointers in the fourth quarter.
“I could not be more proud of them,” Dublin coach Tom Costello said about his team. “That’s what I told them. From Day 1, this has a chance to be one of the best defensive team we’ve ever had. We’ve had some pretty good ones. They take so much pride in defensive effort. They get angry when they give up a basket. It’s that kind of pride in the defense.
“We kind of took them out of what they wanted to do. They had to go to their second and third option and the second and third option ended up beating us. But I couldn’t have asked for a better effort from a group of kids tonight.”
Dublin led 9-6 after the first quarter.
De La Salle went on an 11-0 run to start the second period and held a 24-14 advantage at halftime. The lead briefly widened to 13 in the third quarter but tightened over the final eight minutes.
“We’ve got to keep getting better at closing out games,” De La Salle coach Marcus Schroeder said. “We did a good job of controlling the game and they’re really good. On their home court, they’re going to fight back. They’re going to punch back, for sure, and we knew that. But I just felt we made some mistakes down the stretch. But any road win is a good win.”
