By JOSHUA MCKINNEY, Staff Writer
Defense wins championships, so the axiom goes.
It’s a belief that Brownsville Veterans Memorial’s basketball team is hoping to ride through an already outstanding run.
“I’d say it is (true),” said Darian Thuku, a senior forward for Brownsville Veterans.
“Yes, you can score buckets but without defending your own goal, you won’t win.”
“If you score two points and they score zero, you still win,” Erick Saldana, a junior guard, added.
While the main focus in basketball is typically on who scores the most points, it’s the defense-first mentality of Brownsville Veterans two unsung stoppers, Saldana and Thuku, that has the team on a 22-3 (4-1 in District 32-6A) run.
The pair sacrifices high-volume scoring to head the Chargers’ new look defense this season.
Coach Larry Gibson said Brownsville Veterans made the switch to man-to-man to make up for a lack of height in the paint and bring a more aggressive style this season.
“In the past three or four years here, we had a couple of big kids and we played a lot of zone,” Gibson said. “This year, when we got our team together, we said we’re going to be real quick. We need to work hard on man- to-man because we don’t have any true post players. And so we decided we were going to work on our man to man. So we started off with it during the preseason. We realized we’re pretty good at this.
“We’re doing a pretty good job, and we have some quick kids. So we decided we were going to play man defense and that’s what we’ve done all year. Play straight man (defense this seaon).”
Brownsville Veterans spent the offseason and all of non-district installing it’s man-to-man defense. It was apparent from the start of basketball practices that the two players were going to be the team’s defensive aces.
“We do a lot of man-to-man defensive drills and we noticed right off the bat that they’re our two best defensive players,” Gibson said. “They are very hard to get by. The way we found out about that is from their teammates, because their teammates would tell a coach, ‘Darian and Erick are hard to get by. They’re so quick.’ They play such good defense.”
Saldana usually guards the opposition’s best scorer. He draws this task because of his lateral quickness, which Gibson said is his strongest attribute, but both players are capable of shutting down offensive weapons.
“Sometimes we both trade,” Saldana said. “When I feel tired, we’ll both trade (our man). It’s a little tiring. You come off offense and you feel a little tired you still know you have to get back on defense.”
Gibson said Thuku is the Chargers’ quickest player and has great jumping ability, which allows him to grab 5.4 rebounds a game.
The duo has helped with Brownsville Veterans’ improved defensive play, which in turn helps it put more points on the board through turnovers and fastbreaks.
It’s all a part of the gameplan, which Brownsville Veterans has executed to near perfection during its hot start.
“I feel like the key to a good offense is a good defense,” Thuku said. “When you play good defense, it gives you easier opportunities to get an easy layup or an easy bucket on a fastbreak. It makes things a lot easier. Our team is a run-and-gun team, so playing good defense to start a fastbreak helps a lot.”
Joshua McKinney covers sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6663 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter he’s @joshuabvherald.