Canton overwhelms Brighton in clash for first in KLAA boys basketball

CANTON — For about seven minutes, Brighton showed why it is having one of its best boys basketball seasons in years.

The Bulldogs were knocking down big shots, winning battles on the offensive boards and limiting their opponent to precious few points. They even had an Eddie Millington dunk which seemed to provide a spark.

But only seven minutes of stellar basketball won’t cut it against a team like Canton, which started and finished strong in a 67-45 rout of Brighton Friday night in a battle for first place in the KLAA West.

More importantly, seven minutes won’t cut it in a few weeks when losses become permanent in the state tournament.

That was the warning that was delivered to the Bulldogs following their first lopsided loss of the season.

“It’s one of the first things I said when we went in there — it’s not the end of the season,” Brighton coach Mike Griest said. “But we have to play with the fact at some point it could be if we aren’t playing our best and doing all the things we need to do to win.”

Brighton fell to 16-4 overall, its other three losses coming by single digits.

“Getting beat like this, we’ve got to go in, keep practicing, keep working on our stuff,” Millington said.

Canton moved into sole possession of first place in the West Division at 11-2 with one game remaining, while Brighton dropped to 10-3.

Canton will represent the West in the KLAA championship game against Dearborn or Livonia Franklin, even if the teams finish tied at the top, because of the league’s tie-breaker system of how teams fared against common opponents, starting from the top of the division and moving down. The teams split their season series, but Canton has a better record than Brighton against Howell and Northville, who are tied for third.

Neither game between Brighton and Canton was close. The Bulldogs beat the Chiefs 69-52 in Brighton on Jan. 24.

“The biggest thing for us is we needed to play harder,” Canton coach Jimmy Reddy said. “Brighton totally outworked us in that first game. They had 19 offensive rebounds. Playing harder was an emphasis. Defending and rebounding was an emphasis.”

Canton led 13-4 after one quarter and 32-18 at halftime. The Chiefs’ lead reached 41-20 with 5:50 left in the third quarter before the Bulldogs made a run.

Brighton outscored Canton 16-5 the rest of the quarter, scoring the final seven points, to cut the deficit to 46-36 heading into the fourth. A 3-pointer from the corner in the opening seconds of the fourth quarter that would’ve made it a seven-point game missed the mark.

“At the quarter break, we were up 10,” Reddy said. “Hey, if we win the quarter, we win the game. We just talked about getting back to playing harder and playing with more energy on the defensive end and stringing some stops together. We were able to do that. We did a nice job killing some clock in the fourth quarter, having some longer possessions before they started fouling.”

With the score 49-39, back-to-back 3-pointers by Omar Suleiman and Caleb Williams extended Canton’s lead to 55-39 with six minutes left. Trevor Viau hit a 3-pointer for Brighton, but the Chiefs outscored the Bulldogs 12-3 the rest of the way.

“We made it pretty difficult on them to score,” Reddy said. “They had a really good third quarter, but quarters one, two and four defensively and effort wise, we were pretty solid tonight.”

Dante Favor got Canton started by scoring eight points in the first quarter. Suleiman took over from there, scoring 16 second-quarter points and finishing with 27. He hit seven 3-pointers.

“I got open, I made my shots,” Suleiman said. “I felt pretty good once I started hitting some shots. I started rolling and felt hot.

“Our defense was a lot better (than in Brighton). We were playing a lot harder. We were playing for something. This game was pretty big to us. This was our senior night. We were just playing a lot harder than them, playing better defense, which led into our offense.”

As a team, Canton hit 11 3-pointers. Brighton had only 13 rebounds.

“We have to recover from this disappointment and take what we can from it to make us better,” Griest said. “We have a lot of goals ahead of us. It wasn’t our last game; it wasn’t our best game. They shot 60-some percent, so we’re going to have to work defensively on some things and just learn from it. We can’t replay the game; we would like to.”

Ashton Tomassi had 16 points and four steals, while Trevor Viau had 13 points for Brighton.

Favor finished with 12 points and Williams 11 for Canton.

Contact Bill Khan at wkhan@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillKhan.

This article originally appeared on Livingston Daily: Canton overwhelms Brighton in clash for first in KLAA boys basketball