Spanaway Lake’s gym was packed. But Lincoln left with 37th consecutive league win

The shot clock was winding down, and Emmitt Linton III used a screen to his left, planted his feet and faded to his left as he uncorked the 3-pointer with a defender in his face.

Swish.

“I knew it was going in,” Linton said.

Of all the highlight-reel, crowd-rocking plays for both of these Lincoln and Spanaway Lake high school boys basketball teams, that was the biggest – right in front of the Lincoln bench with 29 seconds to play.

“It told him, even though he probably didn’t hear me, but I said, ‘That’s yours, that’s in!’” Lincoln coach Aubrey Shelton said.

And it was the dagger that completed the third-ranked Abes’ comeback from a double-digit deficit for a 68-62 victory against No. 8 Spanaway Lake in a crowded and loud Spanaway gymnasium on Wednesday night to improve to 10-0 and hand the Sentinels their first loss of the season.

Willie Thomas scored 17 of his game-high 21 points in the second half and Linton scored 20 to lead the Abes.

Linton will assure you he doesn’t get tired of this whole winning thing. Lincoln hasn’t lost a league game since Jan. 23, 2015 (in overtime against Foss) when it was in the 3A Narrows League. So that’s 37 consecutive league victories and the Abes have never lost since joining the 3A Pierce County League before last season.

Lincoln has trailed at halftime against Foss, Wilson and now Spanaway Lake – and came back to win each.

“This group is resilient,” Linton said. “We stay together no matter what. We know we got each other’s backs. We know we’ve been here before plenty of times. We’re down 10, 20 – it don’t matter. We come out here and we’re going to fight. We’re going to win.”

“We have a high standard for our program,” Shelton said. “Everybody is expected to step up and they believe in themselves.”

The difference was Lincoln has been there, done that.

It’s been a long, long time since Spanaway Lake’s gymnasium was that loud and that packed. Fans had to be turned away because the gym was so full – all to watch a team coming off its first state appearance last year since the 1984-85 season.

And the Sentinels (9-1) were coming off a 97-point outing in its tournament title on Saturday against Evergreen of Vancouver, with a big three of 6-foot-5 Isaiah Turner, 6-foot-4 Jordan Garner and 6-foot-4 Divante Moffitt that were averaging 20.2, 19.3 and 19.0 points per game, respectively.

Spanaway Lake led 16-14 after the first quarter and took off in the second.

Literally.

At least Moffit did. He used a halfcourt screen, crossed up one defender and threw down a vicious tomahawk dunk over Lincoln’s Mykel Campbell, a state high jumper in track and field, for a slam dunk that gave Spanaway Lake a 25-16 lead.

“Top three dunk of my lifetime, for sure,” Moffitt said with a laugh afterward.

“He’s got a couple like that,” Spanaway Lake coach Dominic Batten said with a hoarse voice afterward. “But not – that was a huge dunk. That was huge.”

Only he was called for a technical upon landing as Batten was trying to call time out. So Linton sank a pair of free throws and Campbell made a basket to dip into the Sentinels’ lead and their run – which would prove pivotal later in the game.

But then Garner caught fire. He hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key, another from the corner and Terrell Williams scored five consecutive points as Spanaway Lake took a 35-25 lead into halftime.

“We were playing soft and I was playing soft,” Thomas said. “I got my team together and I was like, ‘We just got attack everybody.’ I came out and was like, ‘I can just attack the hoop and be strong.’”

Spanaway Lake led 42-34 in the third quarter before Lincoln answered with a 14-4 run to take a 48-46 lead into the fourth quarter. The Sentinels were held to 5-for-15 shooting in the third quarter and Lincoln attacked the glass and got to the free-throw line more, going 8-for-9 from the stripe.

And Lincoln never lost the lead again, with Thomas scoring nine points in the fourth quarter and Linton scoring seven, including that late 3-pointer to give the Abes a 67-60 lead.

But Batten said his team wasn’t wide-eyed.

“Lincoln is a great team,” Batten said. “I feel like they did the right stuff down the stretch and capitalized on a lot of our mistakes. We don’t walk away thinking we can’t beat them. We walk away knowing that execution, the 50-50 balls, rebounding right, the more intense plays – we got to win those battles and that’s something we can control and bring to the table better.

“We’ll learn from it and we have to because I’m sure Wilson will be the same way. Our guys got to be ready.”

Spanaway Lake hosts No. 7 Wilson at 7 p.m. on Friday.

And these sorts of packed atmosphere’s only help the Sentinels.

“It’s never been like this,” said Moffitt, who scored 14 points. “Never been like this.”

“I think people, obviously you hear the buzz about Spanaway Lake,” Batten said. “And then we’re playing one of the top five teams in the state. We wanted it to be a great atmosphere and the score at the end was not what we wanted. But we’re excited. We know we can play.”

But Spanaway Lake will have to wait until Jan. 26 at Lincoln to try to get another shot at its first win against the Abes.

“We haven’t beat them my whole high school career – fall league, summer, season play last year,” Moffitt said. “I’m friends with a lot of those guys, but on the court you can’t be friends.”

Lincoln was coming off the tournament title at the Torrey Pines Holiday Classic, including a championship victory over Florida-based St. Petersburg, in California, with Thomas earning the tournament’s MVP.

Now it is in the driver’s seat for the 3A PCL title with wins over both Wilson and Spanaway Lake, though it plays each one more time.

“They wanted it a lot, but we wanted it way more than them,” said the 6-foot-6 Thomas, who had a steal and breakaway dunk of his own in the first quarter. “I just feel like we’re coming together as a brotherhood. Us six seniors, we just want to come out because we had a big loss against Nathan Hale (in last year’s state semifinals). We want to repeat our 26-0 and win state.

“At the end of the year we want to be in that state championship, playing against Garfield or Rainier Beach or whoever is in front of us.”

This story was originally published January 3, 2018 at 11:42 PM with the headline "Spanaway Lake’s gym was packed. But Lincoln left with 37th consecutive league win."