Eagles soar past Bay City John Glenn

Redford scores 2,000th point, passes Magic Johnson

By Nick Brzezinski
27 February 2008

greatlakeshoops.com

Essexville--Usually when Brad Redford is playing, all eyes in the stands are on him and in tonight’s district semifinal game, Redford found a second set of eyes guarding him for the whole the third quarter after pouring in 25 first half points.

You can’t stop Brad Redford from scoring, and if you try his Frankenmuth Eagles teammates will beat you as Bay City John Glenn found out after Frankenmuth's convincing 82-56 victory.

It was also a milestone night for the senior sharpshooter, when he scored a lay-up for his 10th point of the night in the first quarter; he scored
his 2,000th point as a Frankenmuth Eagle. He becomes the 31st player in MHSAA history to score 2,000 points.

The Eagles used a strong first quarter to jump ahead and pushed the lead to 23-7 on a 3-pointer by Redford at the buzzer.

After Redford scored 13 first quarter points he scored another 12 in the second quarter including two 3-pointers in the last minute of the half to open up the lead to 45-24.

By outscoring the entire John Glenn team in the first half, something needed to be done to stop Redford and John Glenn elected to go into a triangle-and-2 defense with both guys playing man-to-man defense on Redford.

If the idea was to slow Redford down, it worked. However, this left one and sometimes two Eagles open at a time and Jeremy Warnemuende was often this man as he poured in 3-pointer after 3-pointer and Frankenmuth actually extended their lead by two points to a 62-39 with Redford only scoring two points in the quarter.

In the fourth, John Glenn went back to a normal defense and Redford scored five quick points and left the game with six minutes remaining.

Redford led the way with 32 points on four 3-pointers; Warnemuende had 19 points on five 3-pointers and point guard Nick Shelton finished with nine points.

Chuck Baumer led John Glenn with 15 points; Jordan Snider and Chris Schumann each had seven points.

Game Notes

--After scoring his 10th point to reach 2,000 in the first quarter, Frankenmuth coach Tim Crawford called a timeout and they did a brief announcement regarding the milestone.

--By my calculations, Redford came into the night with 1,990 points and now has 2,022 career points passing Zane Gay (Olivet 2,004), Jim Hammerberg (Baraga 2,010), and Earvin “Magic” Johnson (Lansing Everett 2,012). He still has a long way to go to catch Jay Smith
(Mio 2,841) but he can still pass some pretty good players and move up the ladder.

--I have seen some gimmick defenses but I have never seen a team play two guys straight up man-to-man on a player when he doesn’t even have the ball; it definitely worked by slowing him down but I will take four Frankenmuth Eagles over three John Glenn Bobcats any day.

--After a couple late season losses by Frankenmuth, they look back at full force and look to be a strong contender in Class B.