It’s an Unfair Match: Fairfax Rips Cleveland

Fairfax High School, the team with the front line for the ages, proved once again Friday night that it is, if nothing else, the City’s team for 1986-87. As if there were any lingering doubts.

The Lions, No. 1 in California and No. 2 in the country, won the City 4-A championship and raised their record to 25-0 with a resounding 86-58 victory over Reseda Cleveland before a crowd of 11,150 at the Sports Arena.

Next stop: The state playoffs, beginning next week.

As always, the Fairfax front court of Chris Mills, Sean Higgins and J.D. Green supplied the knockout punch.

Mills, the tournament’s most valuable player, had a game-high 24 points on 9-of-13 shooting; Green scored 21 points to go with 16 rebounds, and Higgins had 14 rebounds and 20 points despite missing 14 of his 22 field-goal attempts.

Adrian King led Cleveland (20-4) with 21 points.

For Cleveland, the loss meant repeat performances on several fronts it would just as soon avoid. The Cavaliers were handled in similar fashion by Crenshaw in last season’s title game, losing to the state’s top-ranked team of 1986.

Friday’s game marked Cleveland’s fourth double-digit loss to Fairfax this season. The 28-point margin this time, though, was the biggest.

Higgins missed seven of his first nine shots before hitting his last two of the first half. The second was an eight-foot turnaround jumper with three seconds to play, after Fairfax had stalled for nearly 1:15, anmd it gave the Lions a 34-23 lead heading into the third quarter.

Green and Mills both had nine points to lead Fairfax in the first half, and Higgins had eight.

Damon Charlot and King had seven each for Cleveland in the first half, while Michael Gray, who had led the Cavaliers in scoring the last seven games, missed all six of his shots and his only free throw.

Cleveland made just 6 of 26 shots in the first half.

Fairfax’s biggest lead of the first half was the 11 it led by at intermission.

That was an ominous sign for Cleveland Coach Bob Braswell, who had said all along that his team couldn’t afford to fall behind early. He knew all too well what that could mean in the long run, having lost three games to Fairfax during the regular season, all by 14 points or more.

The Fairfax lead increased to 15 early in the second half as Mills, the Lions’ leading scorer with a 26.1-point average coming into the game, opened the third quarter with a steal and layup and followed that with a rebound basket off Green’s missed jumper to make it 38-23.

Six straight points by Mills and a basket by Higgins near the end of the third quarter put the Lions up by 21. By then, Mills had scored 19 points and Green 13.

Fairfax won the 3-A title in 1985 before becoming a 4-A team.