Canyon May Be That Good

That the Canyon girls basketball team is good qualifies as news along the lines of water is wet. The Lady Eagles are always good (at worst) and have often been closer to great, as 14 state championships would attest.

Nobody should make too much out of the fact that Canyon clobbered Big Spring 91-15 in Tuesday's bidistrict round, although the case for a basketball mercy rule and the case against four teams in the playoffs both got strong arguments from that game. And comparing scores may be a fool's game, but that might be the best evidence of why the Lady Eagles could end up in the state tournament.

Canyon closed out the District 3-4A season undefeated by routing Pampa 64-8 in the last game of the regular season. The Lady Eagles had already clinched the district title and closed out an unbeaten 3-4A season, while Pampa had already secured the district's fourth playoff spot. That game could be read as a precursor of the Canyon-Big Spring debacle a week later, and evidence that Pampa was an undeserving fourth place team, right?

Not so fast. In the first round of the playoffs against perennial power Plainview, Pampa led early in the game and was tied 11-11 at the end of the first quarter at the Hutcherson Center in Plainview, hardly a neutral court. Maybe the Lady Harvesters had a flashback to their ordeal in Canyon, and they went scoreless in the second quarter, a huge factor in a 63-42 loss to Plainview which ended their season.

Take away that second quarter, and Pampa played nearly even with Plainview. It was the second time I'd seen the Lady Harvesters play this season, the other time being a 63-33 loss at second-place Palo Duro, the only team to give Canyon a scare in district play this season.

In both of those games, the young Lady Harvesters struggled against teams who had superior experience and athletic ability. But not once did it seem to me that from a coaching or playing standpoint that Pampa was completely incompetent. That would be the image one would take away from Pampa's loss to Canyon, but considering how respectably the Lady Harvesters played against a good Plainview team, that had more to do with Canyon's ability than Pampa's lack of ability.

It's one thing to make too big a deal out of Canyon's destruction of a Big Spring team which won only one game in District 4-4A. Canyon's margin of victory was 29 points greater than the next biggest rout in Region I-4A's bidistrict round. But when you consider that Plainview actually had to fight to beat a team which the Lady Eagles defeated by 56 points a week earlier, what does that say about where Canyon stands right now?