Kyem cranks up the pace, Penn Wood runs past AP

LANSDOWNE — The tactics for Shad Kyem were pretty simple Thursday night, no halftime session with the dry erase board needed.

The Penn Wood guard had Academy Park’s Naseim Harley shadowing him in their District 1 Class 5A first-round contest. Harley had three points, three fouls and six missed shots in the first half. So Kyem resolved to take the game to a player already on his heels, figuring that getting the best of one of the Knights’ leaders would bring the rest of the team down with him.

Kyem did just that, scoring 12 of his 16 points in the third quarter and keying a 73-48 runaway win for the eighth-seeded Patriots.

Penn Wood (15-8) advances to Saturday’s quarterfinals, where it will visit top-seeded West Chester East with a spot in the state tournament on the line. The seventh win in Penn Wood’s last nine outings ends the season of No. 9 AP (15-8). Thursday served as the rubber match between the Del Val rivals, with Penn Wood winning by seven points at home Jan. 10 and AP taking the return meeting by eight Jan. 29.

This one didn’t remain that close for very long. Kyem set the tone.

In a game where jump shots weren’t going to cut it — the teams combined to miss 83 shots from the field and 107 in total, including free throws — the direct approach to the basket did the trick.

“Their point guard had three fouls and he was guarding me,” Kyem said. “So I just went right at him and kept going.”

His drives opened up Penn Wood’s panoply of options. Davantae Smith followed his lead, mixing drives to the hole with a pair of 3-pointers for a game-high 24 points. Zac-Chae’us Williams added six points from the backcourt, all on sorties to the rim.

The penetration opened lanes for bigs to either side and receive passes or to clean up the ample supply of misses. Keivon Stevens scored eight first-half points, and Desman Johnson paired nine points with 10 boards.

And then there was Kennedy Poles, who only scored two points. He added a team-high four assists to go with 19 rebounds, as the Patriots held a 59-37 edge on the glass.

“We had a lot of injuries early in the season,” Smith said. “I feel like we did a lot to prepare for this game and get back to the way we play, because the second time we played them, we didn’t play too good.”

The pace also negated the main strategy that Academy Park could’ve countered with: Its full-court press, which can be suffocating. But the press is dependent on made baskets to establish it, and AP just didn’t make enough of them.

The Knights came up empty on 13 of their first 14 attempts, allowing Penn Wood to run out to a 16-3 edge that would never dwindle below seven points. The Knights shot just 27.7 percent from the field (18-for-65) and a ghastly 4-for-18 from the free-throw line.

The damage was mitigated slightly with eight 3-pointers, tying a season high and led by Derrick Northern’s economical 4-for-6 from behind the arc. The long-range shooting was an improvement on the one 3-pointer they had made combined over the two regular-season meetings, but it took 28 attempts to get there. Missed shots begat long rebounds, and with Poles and Johnson showing off their football arms, that often led to run-outs at the other end of the court.

“The game plan was to track the perimeter and make them go inside,” Kyem said. “… It’s intensity. We’ve got good guards. We forced them into the paint and let (Shermik Lofton) shoot and kept (Harley) and (Tahriq Marrero) off the perimeter.”

Lofton scored 12 points to go with team-highs of 13 rebounds, three assists and three blocks, but he was just 6-for-20 from the field and came up empty on five trips to the line. Northern scored 14 points, as did Marrero, who missed both of the regular-season meetings. Harley finished with four points, well down from his season average of 15.0 points per game.

Penn Wood has resembled a jigsaw puzzle all year. Antonio Campbell, who scored three points Thursday, started the year by averaging 18.4 points per game, but missed 10 games in two stretches due to injury. Smith, a transfer from Paul Robeson, stepped up in his absence and has scored in double-figures in each of the last 10 games. As Stevens, a lineman on the football team who started getting sustained minutes in late January, and Johnson have emerged, the Patriots are finally putting the pieces together.

“I feel like we’re playing our best basketball,” Smith said. “It’s intensity and execution. Our coach has been preaching doing all the little things to make everything count.”

Doing that one more time in the next two games will get them to states.