Devils Lake head coach Dustin Brodina said it best: It was a four-team state tournament in Mayville last week.
In the first year of the three-class basketball system, Region 2 wound up being the toughest and most competitive region in Division A. The region tournament had a setup that made advancing to the state tournament a challenge, even for teams like Devils Lake and Grafton, each of which spent time ranked as the second-best team in all of Division A. And it proved too much for No. 3 Four Winds/Minnewaukan, which had to take an early, tough-luck exit.
Grafton, FW/M and Devils Lake were all within hairs of each other all season; in any given week, you could make a reasonable argument to rank them in any order. Devils Lake and Grafton found success through relentlessly versatile offensive attacks, while FW/M was led by Deng Deng — easily the best player in all of Division A.
The first thing that made the format wonky was the number of games played. All three teams went 1-1 against each other during the regular season, but Grafton played 11 games that counted towards its region record, while FW/M played 10 and Devils Lake played eight. Thus, that was the order of the final standings: Grafton at 9-2, FW/M at 8-2 and Devils Lake at 6-2.
The Firebirds won 13 straight games at one point and held the No. 2 spot in Division A for several consecutive weeks. They went from before Christmas to mid-February without losing a game. Yet one loss to the Spoilers — who had previously lost back-to-back games to No. 1 Kindred and FW/M — was enough for the voters to push Devils Lake down to No. 4 and Grafton up to No. 2.
Devils Lake had the best regular season record in Region 2 at 19-2. Grafton was 18-3, while FW/M was 17-4. Had Devils Lake and FW/M played the same number of official region contests as Grafton — matchups against anyone in the region besides each other — they almost certainly would have had the same region record. In that case, Devils Lake would have been the No. 1 seed, while Grafton would be No. 2 and the Indians would be the third seed.
So Devils Lake took a tough-luck third seed in the Region 2 tournament, which gave it a mismatch against last-place Carrington in the first round. The Cardinals were really the only weak link in Region 2; even fifth-place Hillsboro/Central Valley could put up a fight, led by Jacob Brandt and his 1,000 career points.
But after the quarterfinals, things instantly got tougher. Devils Lake had a rematch with Deng and the Indians, which is never an easy task. Playing each other so soon in postseason play, one of the two best teams in Division A was guaranteed to take home an early loss.
Grafton, meanwhile, faced an unranked Thompson team that played out of its mind towards the final stretch of the season, despite a pedestrian 4-6 region record. Drew Overby was the star for the Tommies and helped them compete with the big boys of Region 2. Watching Thompson over the last several weeks, you might never guess that it was a tier below the ranks of Grafton, Devils Lake and FW/M.
The Tommies played Devils Lake close on Feb. 23; they actually led at halftime and at the end of the third quarter, until the Firebirds pulled away in the fourth. They beat H/CV 76-60 in the quarterfinals to advance to a semifinal matchup against the Spoilers, who they shocked by beating 60-57.
Thompson didn’t even score until 3:25 in the first quarter, but it played a strong defensive game early on and shrunk the gap to 10-7 with about two minutes to go. It was 15-15 at the end of the first quarter, and 42-40 in favor of Thompson at halftime. Grafton got it back to 50-50 with 2:20 left in the game, and the Spoilers led 53-52 with 1:54 to go. But Thompson took a 58-57 lead with 1.6 seconds left, and Grafton missed a potential game-tying three-pointer at the buzzer.
Thompson’s surprise victory rattled an already competitive bracket. If Grafton had taken care of business against the Tommies, then there was a very strong chance that all three of the Spoilers, Firebirds and Indians could make it to state. The thinking was that one of them would win the region tournament, while the other two would make state qualifier games — which they would likely win against inferior opponents from Region 1.
But the Spoilers’ loss guaranteed that either they or the Indians would be going home early. And it made things tougher on FW/M — now it had to play Grafton, instead of Thompson, to keep its season alive. Sure, Thompson was playing well, but the Tommies were still an easier opponent on paper, and Grafton was still the higher-ranked, tougher team despite the recent loss.
Deng had tied a school record last time the Indians faced the Spoilers, putting up an absurd 47 points. But Grafton found a way to limit him to just five points in the first half — and none at all in the first quarter. Deng put up eight in the third quarter, but fouled out in the fourth. The Indians couldn’t do quite enough to battle back and fell 70-62 to a consistently tough Grafton team.
It’s easy to say that FW/M should have won its games if it wanted to go to state — and sure, of course it should have. But the level of opponents it had to face in the Region 2 tournament were just as tough, if not tougher, than who they would have played in the state tournament. If they’d beaten Grafton, their state qualifier opponent would have automatically been a team worse than Grafton. And in the state tournament — short of playing Kindred or getting a rematch with a Region 2 team — every opponent would have been ranked lower than who they had to face in regionals.
So the Indians really got the short end of a crowded stick. The biggest hurdle between them and the state tournament was not a potential state qualifier opponent, or even a potential state tournament opponent — rather, it was the very first teams they had to play in the Region 2 tournament. And the fact that an upset forced them to play Grafton in the third-place game was simply an unlucky draw — about as unlucky as it gets, really. The Indians were absolutely a state tournament-caliber team; Region 2 was just so overloaded with talent that they couldn’t poke through the cream of the crop.
Thompson, as it’s been doing recently, put up a tough fight against Devils Lake in the final. The Tommies, for the second straight matchup against the Firebirds, led at halftime. But Devils Lake proved it was the better team in the end, getting a typically strong performance from Wylee Delorme and a big boost from Mason Palmer off the bench to win the region championship.
Grafton, unsurprisingly, won its state qualifier game and advanced to the state tournament. Thompson’s magic finally ran out, as it fell to Valley City 77-69. The Tommies had a strange habit of playing to their competition.
So only two teams from Region 2 will be competing in state, despite four teams who were playing well enough to get there. The nature of some of the best teams in Division A all competing against each other in the same region meant that somebody was going to be left out. With three teams in the region officially ranked in the NDHSAA top five, it truly could be considered a mini state tournament like Brodina said.
So now the actual state tournament begins. But the teams who didn’t make it — particularly FW/M and Thompson — have nothing to hang their heads about, considering how tough their competition was right from the start of the postseason. And it should still be remembered as a successful season for those squads.
