NN Elite’s shots go cold in title game

PHOENIX

With a boatload of underclassmen, the NN Elite girls’ basketball team is starting to scratch their tremendous potential.

The Sanders-based squad made the finals in the gold bracket at the 2017 Native American Basketball Invitational, losing the title to Yakama Nation by a 64-50 count.

“This was our first time making it this far so they were really nervous,” NN Elite coach Lisa Quigley said of her team. “I had a couple of girls say this was their dream to always play here.”

The dream they speak of is playing at the Talking Stick Resort Arena, the venue used by the Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury.

As a team that prides itself on being efficient on both ends of the court, Quigley said they didn’t bring their “A game” against a talented Yakama Nation squad.
“I really don’t know what happened to my girls,” she said. “They totally shut down. With them being a young team they were scared, nervous and too excited. All those emotions together didn’t help the team.”

Quigley said she liked the shots they were taking but for the game they missed 24 field goals with a bevy of them uncontested.

“We shared the ball so we had good shot selections but our shooting was not there,” she said. “This was the worst performance we had for the whole week. Nothing was falling for us.”

In particular, Quigley said they usually make about 8 treys a game but the only basket they got from beyond the arc came in the opening half from soon-to-be sophomore guard Nizhoni Begay.

“All of my players can hit from long range,” she said. “In our previous games, I had a few players hit at least one but in this game we only had one and that hurt us.”

Despite those struggles, the NN Elite team got within 23-20 on a putback from Valiyah Yazzie with 3:38 left in the opening half, which capped an 8-2 run.

Yakama Nation, however, hit a barrage of 3s to go up 32-23 with just over two minutes left until the break.

NN Elite scored the final four points of the half to pull to 32-27 at halftime for its first deficit at the break during the weeklong tournament. The Quigley-coached team then scored seven of the next 10 points of the second half to get within 35-34 with 14 minutes left in regulation.

That was a close as they would get as Yakama Nation went on cruise control by going on a 19-4 run for the next seven minutes as the Washington-based team made 7-of-13 shots in that stretch, which included two treys.

“You have to give credit to them,” Quigley said of Yakama Nation. “They hit so many shots over us and they probably hit 80 percent of their shots on us. We just had no defense. Compared to the rest of the tournament we were a second slower on defense today.”

---