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(BATES COLLEGE) |
LEWISTON, Maine - The blood was gushing down his face. Brian Ellis just had his nose shattered courtesy of an Amherst College elbow as he went up for a layup.
During the subsequent timeout, as Ellis was being treated for his broken nose, senior tri-captain Bryan Wholey conjured up these sympathetic words for his freshman counterpart.
"How did you miss that layup?" Wholey asked.
"It was pretty funny," Ellis admitted.
But Wholey was serious. Ellis missed a bunny. Wholey and the rest of the Bates College men's basketball team have come to expect nothing but the best from the Braintree High product and former Globe All-Scholastic.
"He isn't a role player," said Bobcats coach Joe Reilly, in his 11th season at the helm. "He's a main piece of our puzzle.
Ellis played the second half of that Jan. 19 game with the busted nose, finishing with 17 points on 7-of-12 shooting. Bates lost to Amherst, the top-ranked team in Division 3, 77-76, but Ellis's performance won over his coach.
"He has one of the highest basketball IQ's of any freshman I've coached in the last 11 years," Reilly emphasized.
Bates (15-6, 4-3 NESCAC) is fifth in the New England Small College Athletic Conference and is primed to make this month's conference tournament for the sixth straight season. The Bobcats graduated five seniors last year, including all-NESCAC stars Rob Stockwell and Zak Ray. Ellis's seamless transition is a big reason Bates hasn't missed a beat, securing its eighth consecutive winning season and having the chance to tie or surpass a program-high 20 wins from the 2005-06 season.
The 6-foot-5, 200-pound forward has started 20 of 21 games, coming off the pine in the season opener, and is second on Bates in points (14.3) and rebounds (5.2) per game. He is sixth in the NESCAC in scoring - no other freshman cracks the top 30.
"He's a great athlete," said Reilly of Ellis, who drew interest from several Division 1 soccer programs before choosing Bates for educational reasons. "He's great offensively and defensively. But, his biggest strength is that he never takes a play off."
"I just play the same way I did in high school," Ellis said.
Not quite.
Ellis is still a low-post magician, but, as part of Reilly's free-flowing offense, he has become a legitimate shooting threat. He leads the Bobcats in 3-point field goal percentage (45.7), going 16 for 35, and is 67th in all of Division 3 in field goal percentage on 110-of-200 shooting (55 percent).
Ellis knew he could shoot. But this good?
"No," Ellis said, laughing. "But, I worked hard on [shooting] my senior year of high school" with coach Bob Crook.
"He didn't even attempt a 3-pointer in the preseason," Reilly said.
This pristine shooting touch has made Ellis a tough matchup for anyone.
"He can post up smaller guys and take bigger guys outside," Reilly said. "He's very crafty."
The lone hiccup on the resume is a scoreless first half - he played just 7 minutes due to early foul trouble - at Williams College on Feb. 8. He bounced back in the second half, scoring 17 points - including 10 of Bates's first 12 points - on 7-of-10 shooting to lead the Bobcats to a 78-71 victory.
Reilly has been impressed with Ellis's knack to trounce adversity.
"He's mentally tough and focused," Reilly said. "He's the whole package."
Reilly said Ellis has essentially replaced Stockwell, one of the best to ever don the maroon and white. Stockwell, the fourth-leading scorer in Bates history with 1,512 points, currently plays for the Derby Trailblazers, a semiprofessional team in the English Basketball League.
"It's a coach's dream when one of your leading scorers is taking charges and diving after loose balls," Reilly said.
"That's a sign of a very special player, and that's what Brian Ellis is.
"Brian can be a top five scorer to ever play here."
If Ellis gets his way, he'll accomplish more than Stockwell and the 29 1,000-point scorers in school history. He'll have his own chapter in Bobcat lore.
"He never won the NESCAC Championship," Ellis said of Stockwell. "He never got to the NCAA Tournament. That's something I would love to do as a team. That's my biggest goal."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
