ELY — After pummeling Mesabi East 98-25 on the road last Thursday, the Ely boys took a couple of blows to the chin with a last-second home loss to Cromwell-Wright on Friday and a 72-54 road loss to 12-3 Deer River on Monday.
The huge win against the Giants felt more like a varsity-junior varsity scrimmage than a contest as the Wolves scored at will from all over the court while shackling the Giants on the defensive end. The 73-point smackdown equaled the Wolves’ biggest winning margin of the season against Stella Maris Academy on Jan. 8 and was the sixth time Ely had scored 90 or more points in a game.
“We jumped out early on them, and they really struggled on both ends of the floor,” Ely Head Coach Tom McDonald said. “Mesabi East is very young, and they struggled against our defense.”
Drew Johnson led Ely in scoring with 33, Jack Davies had 24, and Wyatt Tedrick had 20.

Cromwell-Wright
It’s a maxim in sports that if you let a team hang around too long against you, you’re inviting trouble, and that’s what happened to the Wolves on Friday against the Cardinals.
Ely started with a solid 14-5 run, but CW adjusted and was within eight at the half, 29-21.
The Wolves led by 13 in the second stanza when the tide began to turn. The Cardinals closed the gap to six at 49-43 with 6:54 remaining, and three minutes later the Ely lead was down to one at 51-50. Davies nailed a triple to give Ely a four-point edge, but a quick burst by CW gave the Cardinals the lead at 55-54 with just over a minute left. A driving score by Davies with 22 seconds left put Ely on top 56-54, but the Cardinals responded with a three-point dagger with just 3.5 seconds remaining.
McDonald gave the Wolves a fighting chance at the end with the play he drew up during a timeout, with a three-quarter court length pass from Grant Chittum to Johnson, who quickly flipped the ball to Davies in the corner for a guarded three to win the game, but the shot failed to connect.
“(This was a) tough one to lose for us when we led for 35 of the 36 minutes,” McDonald said. “Their kid hit a big shot against us though. We had some bad possessions late in which we turned the ball over and we didn’t shoot the ball well in the last few minutes. I thought Cromwell defended well, though.”
Davies was the team leader in points with 23, while Johnson and Tedrick both had 12. Johnson also hauled down nine rebounds.

Deer River
The highlight of the Monday road trip to Deer River was senior Drew Johnson scoring the 1,000th of his career. Johson has stepped up with some big scoring games this season for the Wolves, and part of his value to the team has been that opponents feel the need to shut him down, opening other scoring opportunities for his teammates.
The lowlight was the way the game finished. The Wolves did a solid job hanging with the powerful Warriors through the half, with the score knotted at 34 each at the break. With still over eight minutes to go, Ely trailed by only three, 48-45. But whether the Wolves simply ran out of gas or a Deer River run was inevitable, the Warriors blanked Ely for the next three minutes in an 11-0 run to go up 59-45. A Davies deuce was a mere speed bump as Deer River reeled off 10 more unanswered points to blow open the contest with a 21-point 69-47 lead, leaving Ely no time for a rally as the Warriors won 72-54.
“I thought we competed well with one of the better teams in the section,” McDonald said. “They made a run on us that we couldn’t recover from. They shot the ball well late and we didn’t. It was nice to compete with them, though, on their home court.”
Johnson’s career milestone came during a 12-point effort for the Wolves, while Davies led the team in scoring with 15.