Windsor head coach Ken Smith relentlessly shouts, rants and hollers at his players on the court. He never stops. It doesn't matter if they're up by 20 or down by 20.
He's continually telling them what they're doing wrong in a booming voice that can fill a fieldhouse as it did Thursday at Bulkeley High School, site of the Central Connecticut Conference boys basketball championship game.
Smith's players are just as relentless with their half-court trapping defense that disrupts and harasses an offense to a point at which it's forced to take shots it doesn't want.
Previously undefeated
Maloney (Meriden) took quite a few of those in the first half and only converted 11 of 28, while the Warriors were taking a 15-11 lead after the first quarter and building a 37-26 advantage by halftime.
Windsor broke it open in the second half behind Na-Sean Banks' eight third-quarter points (team-high 13) and an offense that shot 20-for-39 (34-for-66 for the game) on its way to an 85-70 victory.
"They played pretty well. We got after them on defense," Smith said. "I didn't think we played too well in the half court on offense though. We didn't execute down the stretch. We made some bad errors that we shouldn't have made and that was the sad thing."
Maloney (23-1) did make a run, cutting Windsor's lead to 70-60 on
Ryan Belote's 3-pointer with four minutes left after the Warriors had gone up by as many as 23 in the third quarter. But the Spartans never really threatened down the stretch despite Belote's 22 second-half points (game-high 24), including six 3-pointers.
"I don't know if they got a ton of steals, but what (Windsor) makes you do is they make you hurry what you do," Maloney head coach Howie Hewitt said. "And they make you take shots that you don't normally take. When that happens, now that you've missed shots that you don't normally take, now we're going the other way.
"(Smith's) been doing that since I've known him. And then in the second half, they're making 3s and 3s and 3s. It seemed like they didn't miss one for a while. Our kids played resilient and hard."
Windsor (23-1) made seven 3s in the game, five in the second half; Maloney finished with nine. The Warriors forced 14 turnovers to Maloney's forcing nine.
Maloney was without its 6-foot-5 forward/center
Zachary Milslagle, who injured his knee in the Spartans' 73-67 semifinal overtime victory over Hartford Public, but he should be back for the state tournament.
Darrius Edwards added 23 points for Maloney, while the Warriors received balanced scoring from Jared Wilson-Frame (also a team-high 13 points), Greg Andrade (12) and Ederton Anderson (10).
The semifinals featured four teams all ranked in the Top 10 in the state writers' poll with a combined record of 86-2. Windsor heads to the Class LL state tournament as the No. 1 seed and Maloney plays in Class L as the No. 2.
Both coaches believe the experience in the conference semis and final will contribute to their teams' readiness for what's ahead.
"No doubt it always is (a springboard)," Smith said. "But the thing about it is, we've got to regroup, we've got to refocus, because there's a lot of downstate teams. Hopefully, we'll play a lot better than we played today."
"The best thing is Kenny Smith's teams bring out your deficiencies both as an individual and as a group," Hewitt said. "So, it showed what we can do better as a group and it showed what we need to work on individually. That's what we're going to learn about."
In other conference championships:
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