https://youtu.be/2VoumIvnVGE

Two starters out and the season’s leading scorer with two fouls in under a minute. This sounds like the beginning of an excuse of how a team lost a game. However, not for the St. Paul Academy and Summit School boys basketball team against Mounds Park Academy. On Friday the Spartans beat MPA 63-39.

“We’re not playing really well right now to be honest,” senior Dalante Peyton said after a game in which the bench played almost half of the game, “I mean there’s only room for improvement, but we really gotta pick it up.”

That may sound strange to hear from a player that lead his team with 16 points to a 24 point win, but this is indicative of a continuing message from the seniors on the team.

“There are no moral victories in our program,” senior Kent Hanson said after the three point loss to St. Croix Lutheran over a month ago. He went on to say that the boys basketball team doesn’t compare themselves to the teams they have played but to themselves. Which explains why, even though they beat a five win MPA team by 24 they were unhappy with how they played.

One guy, however, was not unhappy about they played, senior Rafa Buettner-Salido, whose senior speech was about the contributions he has given to the teams that he has managed throughout his time at SPA, got his first assist as a member of the varsity team after joining the team as a player this year.

“It was kind of surreal,” Buettner-Salido said, “It was really cool and now I have to get the first bucket and my dream will be complete…I imagine the first bucket being like [Los Angeles Laker, “The Black Mamba”] Kobe Bryant, me being Kobe obviously, shooting over the top of some [former Boston Celtic, “The White Mamba”] Brian Scalibrine looking kid. It will fall and the crowd will go nuts. Honestly, though ,it’s probably going to some kind of fluke and deflect off of me, which I will be cool with.”

SPA has three games between now and the Feb. 2 game against Breck which is followed on that Friday by the home game against Minnehaha Academy, both teams the Spartans have lost to earlier in the season.

“We have to pick up momentum on both ends of the floor, that’s the biggest thing,” Peyton said.

Junior Emerson Egly, who was missing from the game with an ankle injury added that, “We have not played well…we really need to get our defense going.”

Also missing from the game was starting point guard Ryan Peacock who was “playing like cheeks” before he got injured with a knee injury. Senior Kent Hanson got two fouls in about a minute and had limited minutes.

The Spartans’ next game is a Tuesday Jan 26 against the Blake School at 7 pm at Briggs Gymnasium.