The Most Entertaining Game I Watched at the Mill City Invitational
The Mill City Invite was filled with highly competitive match-ups. But one game on Saturday morning stood out from the bunch. Minnesota Fury’s 2021 Gauntlet team squared off with EJ Hoops, an AAU program based out of Colorado. And let’s…
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Continue ReadingThe Mill City Invite was filled with highly competitive match-ups. But one game on Saturday morning stood out from the bunch.
Minnesota Fury’s 2021 Gauntlet team squared off with EJ Hoops, an AAU program based out of Colorado. And let’s just say that they look the part when they walk in a gym. EJ’s post players are a pair of 2022 stars playing up with their U16 National team. Raegan Beers is every bit of 6’5″, and Lauren Betts is listed as 6’6″ which my eyes would argue is a conservative estimate. Not to mention, the team is coached by 6’11” former Minnesota Timberwolves player Ervin Johnson.
To say that the Fury came out slow would be putting it nicely. EJ Hoops jumped out to an 8-0 lead, that ballooned to 17-2 midway through the first half. Beers and Betts were having their way in the paint, and nothing seemed to be falling for the Fury. With a few minutes left before halftime, the Fury found themselves down by the largest margin of the game, 17 points. Prep Girls Hoops caught up with Fury coach Tim Peper after the game and asked him about his team’s sputtering start. He said, “I think we came out a little shell shocked. They hit us right in the mouth to start the game by getting it into their post players. I think our players were like, ‘oh my God, what are we going to do?'”
Enter 5’5″ Fury point guard Alexis Pratt (Stillwater). Pratt scored the final 7 Minnesota Fury points of the half, which was enough to trim the halftime deficit to 13. Her willingness to repeatedly attack the basket against players a full foot taller than her seemed to rub off on her teammates and provide them with a belief that they could compete with EJ’s size. Peper noted her impact as well, saying “we were kind of dead in the water and things were not going well. All of a sudden she (Pratt) had that little spurt…at that point we said, ‘OK, we can do this now.'”
The Fury slowly seized control the tempo throughout half number two. They were able to push the pace and work their way back within striking distance mainly by scoring in transition. Fury’s post players, Emily Kulstad (Prior Lake) and Sophie Hart (Farmington) , also seemed to settle into a groove defensively. The pair stifled EJ’s upfront duo to the point that the team’s guards eventually stopped looking inside altogether. EJ’s double-digit lead steadily shrank beginning around the 10 minute mark of the second half. And with 4 minutes to play, the Fury had cut it all the way down to a 2 point game.
While there’s not doubt it was a team effort by a Fury group that refused to quit, Pratt was the player that made the comeback possible. Her relentless attacking mentality continued all game, along with a few 3’s and mid-range jumpers sprinkled in for good measure. Pratt possesses elite-level speed and quickness, and no one that EJ Hoops assigned to her had any luck staying between her and the basket. I caught myself impulsively muttering “wow” on multiple occasions as she sliced through and sprinted past defenders on her way to a game high 22 points. The visual of a 5’5″ point guard repeatedly meeting and beating multiple 6’5″+ players at the rim was wildly entertaining. After 3 full days of basketball at Mill City, I can confidently say that it was the most impressive performance I watched all weekend.
Pratt’s coach summed up her game well, noting that “she just plays hard all the time. She’s super competitive. She competes on every possession. That’s the number one thing I notice about her. She’s kind of like a little bulldog out there. She shoots the ball well, and the thing that you saw today is she’s got the mid-range game going, the floater, the pull-up jump shot. They were just too big for us to finish around the rim so you need to do things like that to make some shots.”
Fury guard Destinee Bursch (Chaska) sank 2 free throws to give the Fury their first lead of the game with just under 3 minutes remaining, and it was clear they had no intentions of giving it back. It was as if those free throws lifted a weight that off of the Fury players that they had been carrying all game. Impressive team defense, quality possessions, and clutch free throws down the stretch sealed the comeback victory for the Fury’s top 2021 team in what was the most entertaining game that I saw at the Mill City Invitational.
(photo courtesy of The Stillwater Gazette)