The Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team took their show on the road last weekend, beating the Nipissing Lakers 86-69 and Laurentian Voyageurs 80-64 to improve to 4-0 on the season.
The wins answered some questions from the Ravens’ opening weekend but left others unanswered, including why Carleton starts slow.
After completing a comeback win against the McMaster Marauders on Nov. 5, Carleton again struggled in the first quarter against Nipissing Nov. 11. The Ravens were down 22-11 before going on a scoring run. They took the lead in the first minutes of the second quarter on a layup from guard Aiden Warnholtz.
“We want to try and be a team that doesn’t need to be down 12 to give an urgent effort,” Ravens head coach Taffe Charles said. “We’re working on it and trying to get guys to be more urgent early and communicate better early.”
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The Ravens improved against Laurentian Nov. 12. They produced a dominant first quarter, leading 29-8 when the first buzzer sounded. But the team collapsed defensively over a two-minute span in the second quarter, when the Voyageurs scored 16 consecutive points to make it a 10-point game.
The back-and-forth continued into the fourth quarter, when Laurentian came within five points of the Ravens with seven minutes left. Ultimately, Carleton pulled away.
Grant Shephard led the Ravens with 19 points and 14 rebounds. Warnholtz recorded a triple-double, putting up 17 points, 12 rebounds and 12 assists.
Warnholtz’s well-rounded performance was just the latest in his list of impressive stat lines this season.
After dropping 30 points on Nov. 5, Nipissing defended Warnholtz aggressively on Friday, with two players on him whenever he had the ball. It forced Warnholtz to pass more, and while he ultimately scored only eight points, he recorded a regular-season career high of 13 assists.
“He’s playing at such a high level that now he’s giving people wide-open shots and wide-open advantages,” Charles said. “[Other players] got to take advantage of it.”
Warnholtz’s ability to remain an effective offensive weapon while being defended aggressively also helped address Charles’s concerns from opening weekend, when much of Carleton’s offence was produced by Warnholtz and Shephard.
The weekend was an awakening for guard Connor Vreeken. He struggled during opening weekend, especially on Nov. 4 against York when he scored only two points in 17 minutes, but he bounced back and scored 23 points against Nipissing.
“He’s at this time in his career that he needs to be a good player on both ends of the floor,” Charles said. “He needs to contribute offensively on a daily basis … He knows the expectations. He wants to do it, so it was nice to see him make some shots.”
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The Ravens lost 76-62 to the Queen’s Gaels on Friday, their first loss in Kingston since 1998. The team will return home on Nov. 25. While the games against Nipissing and Laurentian were far from perfect, Charles said he is encouraged by his team’s potential.
“Sometimes you have teams that are veteran teams and it’s about maintaining stuff and tweaking things,” Charles said. “This team has a lot of room for growth. Hopefully we just keep getting better each and every game, and if we can find a way to get results in the meantime, that’s great.”
Featured image by Veronica Carvalho.
