by Mark McDermott
By the time they’d arrived at the championship game last Saturday, the Mira Costa Boys Basketball team had wreaked a wide swath of havoc in a furious march through the CIF Southern Section Division I playoffs. They’d blown out two teams by over 20 points and two others more than ten. The closest margin of defeat against the Mustangs was 11 points.
It wasn’t just the margins of victory that stood out, but the dominating manner in which Costa had dispatched some very good opponents. They didn’t just blow out a 29-3 Leuzinger team by 22 points, but rattled them with a blitzing defense and an unselfish and relentlessly flowing offense. They didn’t just beat a 26-5 Santa Barbara team by 21, but held them to an almost humiliating 40 points.
And so when their defense came out swarming Saturday night at the Toyota Center in Ontario and the Mustangs jumped to an early 8-4 lead, it felt like this Mira Costa team would make history and claim its first CIF Southern Section title.
But after that early lead, Mira Costa would never take another lead. Los Alamitos, with its own trapping defense, turned the table and forced the Mustangs into uncharacteristic turnovers. The result was by the end of the first quarter, the Griffins had taken 21 shots compared to 10 for the Mustangs. By halftime, the Mustangs had 13 turnovers, and the Griffins had a 38-30 lead that felt much larger.
“We went into the game knowing what was coming,” said MCHS Coach Neal Perlmutter. “We´ve played Los Alamitos three years in a row. The last two years, they’ve been running a very aggressive full court press, into a trapping 3-2 zone. So we prepared for it all week, but we didn’t come close to executing to our ability in the first half of the game. And as a result, we also gave up a lot of offensive boards. Those two factors put us in an eight point hole heading into halftime.”
Los Alamitos star forward Trent Minter, who actually attended Manhattan Beach Middle School before relocating to Orange County, led the Griffins attack. Minter is a fluid 6-6 senior who is the first player in Los Alamitos history with over 225 rebounds and 400 points in three consecutive seasons. He had nine points in the first quarter alone.
Minter was matched by Costa star Eneasi “EZ” Piuleini, the 6-foot-7 senior forward who has led the team in scoring this season and has increasingly emerged on the defensive end as well. He would finish with 17 points, and his timely three-pointers kept Costa within striking distance throughout the game.
All season, we’ve counted on EZ to be our offensive leader, and throughout the playoffs he’s been dominant on that end of the floor,” Perlmutter said. “He’s also stepped up his game on the defensive end, blocking shots, being more aggressive. He’s just a consistent offensive weapon that we can count on, a settling presence.”
But Piuleini also struggled with the Griffins’ trapping defense, committing 7 turnovers.
“He had some turnovers, but he also helped keep us in the game by hitting some big, big threes in each half,” Perlmutter said.
The Mustangs came into the game 29-3, riding an eight game win streak. They hadn’t played in a genuinely close game since their thrilling one-point victory over neighboring powerhouse Redondo Union in early February in which they came from 16 down to claim a share of the Bay League championship title. But when they came out for the third quarter, things took a turn for the worse. With four minutes left in the quarter, they found themselves down 13.
Nothing was going Costa’s way. Shots went in and out, and they continued to struggle with the Los Alamitos pressing and trapping, to the point that when they did break the press little time remained to set up half court offense, resulting in a lot of desperation heaves. To make matters worse, even as the Mustang defense shut down Minter, two other Griffin players caught fire, backup point guard Tyler Lopez and starting shooting guard Wesley Trevino. Lopez, not known for his offensive firepower, scored a crucial 13 points, while Trevino did everything — he blocked two shots, took two charges (he led the team with a remarkable 35 charges taken during the regular season), and led the team with 15 points.
This is when a lesser team might have just folded. But the Mustangs dug deep, and mounted a fourth quarter comeback, led by the gritty play of senior point guard Christian Kranz. He repeatedly broke the press, and was all over the place defensively, deflecting passes, executing suffocating double-teams. He made things happen, helping the Mustangs claw their way back into the game by sheer force of will.
“He helped break their press and put our guys in position to get open looks,” the coach said. “He’s a four-year varsity guy who started as a junior and senior. And you know, sometimes he doesn’t score a lot, but in games where he has the opportunity to, he can score. He’s a very unselfish player, and developed into a great high school point guard.”
Perlmutter said that ever since Kranz’s 8-assist performance against Redondo, Kranz has played with a more determined swagger.
“I think that game gave him confidence throughout the playoffs that he could be the floor general for us,” Perlmutter said. “He did an excellent job the whole playoffs, and the championship game was no exception.”
It wasn’t pretty, but the Mustangs somehow scrapped their way back into the game. Los Alamitos had only four turnovers in the first three quarters; they had four in the first five minutes of the fourth quarter. Their offense ground to a halt, and Costa kept grinding. With 4:26 left in the game, 6’8 senior forward Luke Hammerschmidt tied the game 54-54 with a free throw.
“When they tied the game, I was not surprised, because we’ve seen their heart and their character all season long,” Perlmutter said. “And that’s the characteristic of a great team. They never give up, and they never point fingers, which is critical. They just find a way to crawl themselves back into the game.”
“We saw it the entire year. I think we only had one game all year where we were not tied or in the lead in the second half. If we were behind, we found a way to come back and either tie it up and take the lead in every single game this year.”
The Griffins responded with two clutch hoops, a short jumper by sixth man
Tamori Guyness and a runner by Lopez, but then 6 ‘5 senior swingman McCarthy Bedner was fouled shooting a three and coolly made all three free throws to bring it back to one. A midrange jumper by Trevino and then a free throw by Minter extended the lead to four with 21 seconds left in the game. But then Kranz — who else? — nailed a stepback three with 8 seconds left to bring the game back within a point. Trevino was fouled intentionally and calmly sank two free throws, bringing the lead back to 3 with 7 seconds left.
Kranz ran the length of the floor, weaving through defenders, and took a running three pointer, barely missing to end Costa’s championship bid. It was the kind of loss that is particularly hard to take, because in a very real sense — with 21 turnovers — the Mustangs gave the game away.
“You can’t have 21 turnovers in a championship game and expect to come out on the positive end of it,” Perlmutter said.
But of course, it’s not just giving it away. The Griffins defense took the ball away, and earned the victory with a scrappiness and unselfishness that Costa recognized as much like their own.
“They are similar to us in that they have seven or eight guys that can go for 10 or 15 points on a given night,” Perlmutter said. “I wasn’t surprised their role players stepped up.”
Los Alamitos has four players who have scored over 1,000 points over their high school careers — Minter, Trevino, Guyness, and point guard Liam Gray. The fact that they all did it together, on one team, is a feat that the LA Times noted is particularly notable “in an era of player movement.”
Costa likewise has had a solid core who stayed together throughout their high school career. Seven of Costa eight rotation players are seniors, the only exception being sophomore Paxx Bell Jacobs. In addition to EZ, Kranz, Bedner, and Hammerschmidt, are seniors Max Jacob, Bryson Bryker, and Jakob De Armas. The only rotation player who didn’t come up through the ranks was the big man Hammerschmidt. All of the Griffins are likewise homegrown. Sports Illustrated actually did a preview of the championship game because it was so unusual for two teams to have nearly all homegrown players in a time of frequent player movement, noting that “the two schools will provide a breath of fresh air when they clash for a high-level boys basketball championship.”
This togetherness, Perlmutter said, is part of what set the Costa squad apart.
“There’s this great sense of familiarity and camaraderie,” he said. “And for me, the biggest joy is coaching a team where nobody cares how many points they score. That’s been the case the entire year. It makes it easier as a coach when the guys put the team and winning before their egos. That’s what makes the team so special.”
It’s also what makes a successful program take root. One of the coach’s goals when he was hired in 2018 was exactly this, to build a program in which kids who grew up locally stayed at Costa to play.
“For a number of years, kids were going to Loyola or going to Bishop Montgomery or going to other schools because they didn’t want to play Costa,” Perlmutter said. “And now kids who maybe were considering private schools or other options, we’re getting a lot of those kids. Now they want to come to Mira Costa for their high school career. They look up to the Costa basketball program, they come to our youth camps in the off season, and they’re excited to be Mustangs when they hit ninth grade.”
Three days after their disappointing loss, the Costa boys were back home, hosting an 18-win Crean Lutheran team in the opening round of the CIF Division 1 state tournament. Once again, they came out sluggish, and went into the fourth quarter getting beat, 45-42. Perlmutter called a timeout late in the third quarter in which he spoke very briefly but animatedly to the huddle, then walked away and tossed a clipboard to the gym floor on the sideline in obvious and uncharacteristic frustration. Asked what his message had been, he gave a fairly sanitized account.
“I told the team they had to pick up their energy, make quicker defensive rotations, and find the shooters,” he said. “If we’re going to press, the effort needs to go up a couple of notches.”
Whatever he said worked. The intensity level went up more than a couple notches. In a remarkable display of pure grit, Costa held Crean to 3 points in the fourth quarter and scored 19, including key threes by Kranz and Bedner. They won 61-48.
The State tourney has several quirks, including the fact that several big school open division teams are dropped into Division 1, as are some of the better Division 2 teams. They face 24-6 Torrey Pines on Thursday, and if they win will get a chance either at a rematch with Los Alamitos or with bitter rival Redondo Union. So it’s going to be a long uphill battle for the Mustangs. But of course, that is exactly the kind of terrain in which this team thrives.
Perlmutter said he gets a lot of feedback from the community about this team’s historic run, and two words come up most often — grit, and fun.
“People that I don’t know stop me and say, ‘Great job. You guys have a lot of heart. Your guys have great characters,’” he said. “So their characteristics as a team are not only evident to myself and my coaching staff, but evident to people who watch the games and don’t know us personally. That says a lot about how we play the game. We play the right way. We’ve been overwhelmed by support from the crowds we’ve had down the stretch run. It’s been great to reinvigorate the local community.” ER
