{"id":95481,"date":"2023-02-16T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-17T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/sports\/tmhs-wins-handily-against-palmer\/"},"modified":"2023-02-17T11:08:50","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T20:08:50","slug":"tmhs-wins-handily-against-palmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/sports\/tmhs-wins-handily-against-palmer\/","title":{"rendered":"TMHS wins handily against Palmer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t

By the fourth quarter of the Thunder Mountain High School boys basketball team’s win against Palmer High School, the only suspense left was over whether Sam Sika would score.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

And just inside the fourth quarter’s 4-minute mark, the bruising, seldom-deployed senior settled that with a free throw that drew cheers from both the bleachers and the bench en route to a comfortable 61-38 TMHS win. Sika finished the game with 3 points, leading his team in scoring over the game’s final quarter.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

\"TMHS<\/a>

TMHS senior Sam Sika (32) drives through contact late in a Thunder Mountain High School victory against Palmer High School. (Ben Hohenstatt \/ Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

The leading scorer for the game’s other 24 minutes was junior Thomas Baxter who put up 22 points across three quarters, including 9 points in a white-hot first quarter for TMHS.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

“We jumped out to an early lead,” said coach John Blasco in a post-game interview. “I think that obviously helped carry the momentum for the night. I’m not sure that I recall another time we scored 26 points in the first quarter.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

Juniors Samuel Lockhart and James Polasky also reached double-figure scoring totals with 13 and 10 points, respectively.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

“The guys were finding each other in really good ways, both inside and on the perimeter, so that was really fun to watch,” Blasco said.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

TMHS was also aggressive on defense, disrupting passing lanes and swatting shots that helped set up some of those fluid possessions.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

\"Thomas<\/a>

Thomas Baxter puts up a shot against Palmer High School. The TMHS junior finished the game with 22 points. (Ben Hohenstatt \/ Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

“Palmer’s a young team this year, and a travel day, so we thought, ‘Let’s come out with a little bit of pressure and see if we can get ourselves going ,’ and defense leads to offense,” Blasco said.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

The Falcons have now won back-to-back games, improving their record to 6-14 with a 1-3 conference record.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

TMHS will have a chance to even its conference record up with games set for 7:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday against Ketchikan High School. The teams split a pair of close games late last month in Ketchikan.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

• Contact Ben Hohenstatt at (907)308-4895 or bhohenstatt@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BenHohenstatt.<\/em><\/p>\n\t\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Falcons never looked back after a 26-point first quarter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":474,"featured_media":95482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6],"tags":[240,75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-95481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-sports","tag-high-school-sports","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95481"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=95481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}