Pembroke Pines Charter basketball heads to first state championship with win vs. Naples

The Pembroke Pines Charter boys’ basketball team found out Thursday afternoon that there are other ways to win a game than relying on three-pointers.

For the Jaguars, who were making their state final-four debut, that was a strong inside game and getting to the free-throw line. The combination of those two wound up propelling Pines Charter to an 81-71 victory over Naples on Thursday afternoon in a Class 5A state semifinal at the RP Funding Center.

The win propels Pines Charter, which had to battle its way through the regionals on the road as a No 5 seed after getting upset by Northeast in the district final, into Saturday’s 5A championship game.

The Jaguars will look to become the second team to win a state title at the school (softball being the other) when they will take on Tallahassee Rickards, which defeated Sebring 59-44 in the other semifinal, at 3 p.m.

Pines Charter (26-2), whose only two losses came against Northeast, made just one three-pointer the entire game out of 16 attempts. Instead the Jaguars went inside and took advantage of their size and then leaned on point guard Dallas Graziani to create penetration and get to the free-throw line.

“No way I would’ve ever thought we would still be playing on Saturday,” said Pine Charter coach Dave Roca when asked if he knew before the game his team would be 1-for-16 beyond the arc. “I’m still trying to figure it out. We talked about it in the locker room. This team is resilient and finds different ways to win games and needed to do that today. They understand that there is always a game within the game and are kind of mastering that at the right time and did that today.”

Roca even watched Graziani, normally a three-point sharpshooter struggle (0-for-5) from beyond the arc. But the inside game worked. Graziani wound up leading all scorers with 29 points because he penetrated the scrappy Naples defense and either dished off to the team’s two big forwards, Amarachi Ujagbor and Pete Laidley (20 and 10 points, respectively), or shot it himself.

Graziani, a senior and Nova Southeastern commit, was not only 7-of-10 from the floor with two-point attempts but showed off his season-long 90 percent free-throw percentage by getting to the line 15 times and making all 15 free throws. The Jaguars finished 26-for-29 as a team.

“It was just one of those days, every team has them when you just can’t hit and today was that day for us,” Graziani said. “When it’s one of those days, you have to figure out other things that you can do. I’m a scorer so I just had to find other ways to score. That meant creating more penetration, create contact and get to the line as well as dish it off underneath with drop-off passes, and I think we all did that well.”

Pines Charter spent the entire second half pulling away from a 37-30 halftime lead, only to have the smaller but relentlessly scrappy Golden Eagles (24-7), who were making their first final-four appearance in 29 years, keep battling back.

A 15 point lead (59-44) with 6:59 left dwindled all the way down to seven (65-58) with 3:24 left before back-to-back slam dunks by Ujagbor spurned a 7-0 run to push it back to 14 and end the issue.

“Their (Naples) scrappy style can be really annoying, but our ability to keep our composure and come together as a team and find different ways to score other than threes was why we won today,” said Ujagbor, who also pulled down 10 boards. “We were able to come together during timeouts in the huddle and find different plays and ways to get the ball in the bucket.”