MVP Miller leads Piscataway girls basketball team to GMCT championship

PISCATAWAY -  After watching her team's double-digit deficit dwindle to eight points midway through the fourth quarter, Piscataway High School senior LaNiya Miller answered with a 3-pointer from the right corner.

The huge basket ignited a contest-closing run in which the Chiefs scored eight of the game’s final 10 points to pull away for a 51-37 victory over Edison in the Greater Middlesex Conference Tournament final at the Rutgers Athletics Center on Thursday night.

Miller, who will continue her career at Stony Brook University, finished with a game-high 18 points to earn Most Valuable Player honors while leading Piscataway to its fourth title in the last six years and rekindling memories of her first championship appearance four years ago.

“I haven’t been here since my freshman year, so there’s a lot of emotions going through my head right now,” said Miller, who considered herself fortunate to be able to take and make a clutch shot during crunch time. “My teammates trusted me in the end and trust me enough to knock down shots.”

Shots weren’t necessarily falling for either team, as Piscataway shot 30 percent from the floor and Edison converted 28 percent of its field-goal attempts.

The Eagles had open looks from the perimeter. The Chiefs doubled down on center Daniella Marmol, who wisely kicked the ball out to her guards on the wings, but Edison was unable to convert with any consistency from beyond the arc.

“We didn’t knock them down,” Edison head coach Frank Eckert said of the long-range jumpers. “We just didn’t have our shots today. You live by the three, you die by the three. Sometimes that happens. If we made a couple of shots, it may have been a different game. Kudos to Piscataway. They did their part.”

Freshman sensation Ariel Jenkins, who scored a total of 47 points in Piscataway’s regular-season sweep of Edison, including a pair of free throws with no time on the clock in a 57-56 win, was limited to just two points, both of which came in the opening quarter, and was sent to the bench with four fouls with 6:31 remaining in the contest.

Rutgers University head women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer was in attendance, likely to get a birds-eye view of Jenkins, who may not have lit up the scoreboard, but whose presence was felt in other aspects of the game, including interior defense and on the boards.  

Lourdes Marisagan drained Edison’s sixth and final 3-pointer with 5:40 remaining, helping the Eagles close to 41-32. She finished with 10 points, while backcourt mate Samira Sargent netted a team-high 16 points.

Edison had a chance to further slice the deficit, but missed a wide-open fastbreak layup and turned the ball over on its next two possessions. Piscataway finally answered those three squandered opportunities when Yamirah Bennett converted a spinning layup in the paint, rebuilding the Chiefs’ lead to 43-32 midway through the fourth quarter. Bennett finished with 13 points.

Piscataway (21-4), which struggled against the press in earlier rounds of the tournament, had some initial difficulty when Edison started picking up the Chiefs’ guards at three-quarters and full court in the first half. But Piscataway eventually proved it could handle the pressure, including double-team traps, which rookie head coach Chris Puder said was another key to the victory.

“We showed (in earlier rounds) if you press us you might be OK,” Puder explained. “Our guards were able to solve that today.”

Piscataway’s sizable frontcourt, including Saniya Myers and Jenkins, was also a factor, not only in denying Marmol, who finished with three points, well below her 15.4 scoring average, but in altering the shots of Edison’s guards upon dribble penetration.

“Our bigs knew if you go out with your hands up, they’ve got to shoot higher,” said Puder, noting Edison’s guards had to put more arc on their layup attempts.

The Eagles owned a 46-45 rebounding edge, a deceptive statistic because many of the Eagles’ boards were long-range caroms off perimeter misses, while Piscataway largely controlled the offensive glass, creating second- and third-chance scoring opportunities for itself. Myers and Marmol each finished with 10 rebounds.

“The last time we played them, the one thing we didn’t do well was rebounding,” Miller said. “We knew coming in we had to get boards.”

Piscataway opened the game with a 7-0 run, which sharp-shooting guard Brooke Moll ignited with a 3-pointer.

The Chiefs built their lead to 16 points – their biggest – late in the first half before Sargent buried a buzzer-beating 3-pointer from about 10 feet inside the midcourt stripe to make the score 41-28 at the break.

“It’s a learning experience,” Eckert said of a tough loss for his young team, which features just one senior. “You hate to have a learning experience in the championship game, but at the end of the day, they’ve got to take what they can from this and move on.”