(NOTE: This is Part 5 of Green Season: Inside the 2000 Greenfield basketball season.)
Sitting at 13-1 on the season, life was pretty good for the Greenfield High School basketball team. Balanced scoring, feisty effort, lockdown defense. Head coach Scott Thayer had plenty to smile about when his club walked into the gymnasium at East Longmeadow High School on Feb. 7, 2000.
GAME 15 (Feb. 7, 2000): Greenfield 62, East Longmeadow 58
The goals only went up as the season progressed. Winning the Suburban League was in sight, as Greenfield stood a perfect 7-0 in conference play. Now the team wanted an unbeaten run through one of the toughest leagues in Western Mass.
After a 15-point win the first time around against the Spartans at home, the Wave knew the rematch on the road wasn’t going to be quite so easy. East Longmeadow locked down Greenfield leading scorer Billy Thomas, holding the sharpshooter to just two points — almost 17 below his season average. The Spartans played a box-and-1 against him, challenging someone else to beat them.
Enter Deyvehn East. He scored all 16 of his points in the second half, and Luke Martin went for 13 points and 14 rebounds as Greenfield rallied from a halftime deficit to keep that undefeated SL streak alive.
“We just hung in there mentally,” Thayer told the Recorder afterward. “The people that came to support us were great. It was a team/community victory.”
GAME 16 (Feb. 11, 2000): Greenfield 75, West Springfield 59
GAME 17 (Feb. 15, 2000): Greenfield 82, Minnechaug 76
Thomas got back on track, scoring 23 points in a rout of West Side. That set up a huge showdown with second-place Minnechaug. Like the East Longmeadow rematch, Greenfield expected a much tougher time with the Falcons the second time around.
That’s exactly what they got.
With Minnechaug (11-6, 7-2) speeding up the tempo, Greenfield had to play a bit out of its comfort zone. The Wave preferred to lock down defensively, keep opposing teams in the 40’s and 50’s. The style on Feb. 15 was a bit different, but the Wave adapted. Thomas led five players in double figures with 19 points, followed by East (18), Martin (15), Tim Burns (14) and Aaron Clark (12 points, 17 rebounds).
“Wave outlast Falcons,” read the headline in the next day’s Recorder. The club clinched at least a share of the SL crown for the first time since 1995-96, improving to 16-1 overall, 10-0 in the league.
“I thought we played their game,” Thayer said. “It was a shootout and we got through it. It might not be our best style, but we have played it in the past and done OK.”
Twenty years later, Thayer said he looked back through old scorebooks from that 2000 season and was surprised with seeing some of the results.
“We blew some teams out but a lot of games were like that, 82-76 or whatever,” he recalled. “It wasn’t like we were dominating everybody. You kind of forget that as times goes on.”
GAME 18 (Feb. 17, 2000): Commerce 54, Greenfield 43
A trip to Springfield for a late-season independent game against one of the best teams in Division I might have been the best thing to happen to Greenfield during the 2000 season.
Visiting Greenfield fell behind right of the gate, trailing by a whopping 32-10 margin at halftime. The Wave ultimately made a game of it, but fell by double digits for their first loss since losing to Cathedral back on Jan. 4.
“The Green Wave never knew what hit it,” read the story in the Recorder.
“We came out a little lethargic and their speed put us back on our heels,” Thayer said. “They are the fastest team in Western Mass. They’ve got to be. I mean, those cats can fly.”
GAME 19 (Feb. 21, 2000): Greenfield 63, Chicopee Comp 41
GAME 20 (Feb. 24, 2000): Greenfield 68, Putnam 51
An independent loss to a Division I powerhouse certainly wasn’t the end of the world. The sky was not falling inside Nichols Gymnasium.
To close out the regular season slate, Greenfield thumped Chicopee Comp and Putnam to cap an undefeated Suburban League run. Twelve SL games, 12 wins. Overall record? 18-2.
“Wave conclude perfect Suburban season, 68-51: Expected to receive top seed in WMass tourney,” read the Recorder headline after the Putnam victory.
Thomas finished third in the Recorder-area scoring race, posting a 17.8 point per game average (355 total points). Athol’s Sean Sullivan was the area’s leading scorer (19.9), followed by Kevin Harrington of Pioneer (18.1). Thomas was the only GHS player in the top 10.
“If you had asked me at the beginning of the season if we were going to finish with that many wins (18), I’d have said probably not,” Thayer told the paper. “But as of midnight, we’re back to 0-0 and we’ll go from there.”
Check back next week for Part 6 of this series, “Tourney time.”