Eagan puts on dominant performance against Eastview in section boys basketball final
Max Buslee called the public perception of Eagan’s boys basketball program “a label on our back.”
And it might as well have weighed a ton.
The knock on the Wildcats was they didn’t need to be taken seriously once the playoffs started. Maybe there were years when that reputation was deserved, but 2024 is not one of them. Thanks to an efficient all-around performance in the Class 4A, Section 3 championship game, Eagan is headed to the state tournament for the first time since 2005.
The Wildcats’ 60-42 victory over Eastview on Thursday night in a packed Eagan High School gym ended the Lightning’s Cinderella tale but gives Eagan a chance to add another chapter to its story.
“We’ve been hungry, hungry for a long time,” said Buslee, a senior captain who scored 14 points in the section final. “We’ve always had a label on our back, and we finally broke through. This year it felt different. We’ve been grinding all season because this was our goal. It feels amazing.”
The Wildcats (17-12) play Park Center (25-3) in the Class 4A quarterfinals at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 20, at the Target Center. Park Center, the tournament’s No. 2 seed, is making its fourth state appearance in six years, including a championship in 2022 and second place last year.
The Eagan-Park Center winner will play Minnetonka or Coon Rapids in the semifinals at 8 p.m. Thursday at Williams Arena. The championship game is 8 p.m. Saturday, also at Williams Arena.
Eagan was the No. 1 seed in Section 3 while two-time defending champion Eastview was seeded sixth. Their records were vastly different; going into this week Eastview (6-23) was one of only two teams in Minnesota with losing records that were still alive in the boys basketball postseason.
Some saw the section final as a tossup because Eastview won its first two section games convincingly and appeared to have found the right mix of players to put around standout forward Jonathan Mekonnen. Even the Eagan coach, Kevin McKenzie, said Eastview had a playoff pedigree the Wildcats lacked.
But, “I heard a good quote as we were preparing for this game,” McKenzie said. “Every champion was a contender at some point. And that’s what I told the guys. It’s our time.
“Eastview has come out of the section four out of the last six years. So yeah, we might be the No. 1 seed, but they’re the defending champion. We wanted our guys to understand that everybody has to go through this. That quote about all champions being contenders at some point really resonated with them.”
The Wildcats had a plan and executed it to near-perfection. They hounded Eastview’s scoring threats, forced turnovers, hit three-pointers from the wing, grabbed offensive rebounds, and scored at the rim.
“They have three guys who score the majority of their points, and in some games they were the only three who scored,” McKenzie said, referring to Eastview’s Mekonnen, senior forward Nolan Segner and senior guard Abdulqadir Abdulqadir. “We held them all under their averages, which was the goal. Their other guys are good players but weren’t scorers, so if we forced them to score, we were putting ourselves in a good position.”
Buslee’s three-pointer 2 minutes, 25 seconds into the game put Eagan up 7-5, and the Wildcats never relinquished the lead after that. They led 29-21 at halftime and added on in the second half as the Lightning struggled to get good looks at the basket and convert the opportunities they did get.
“All that anxiety, all that stress building up to it, when the game started we tried to push that on them and make them fight back,” Buslee said. “We were the physical ones. We took the game over from the start, and that was our plan.”
Eagan senior forward Liam Madigan had 15 points and five rebounds. Sophomore forward Alex Schroepfer had nine points and five rebounds, and senior forward Trevor Syring added eight points.
This will be Eagan’s fifth time at the state boys basketball tournament, with the other four coming in an eight-year span from 1998 to 2005. Eagan was the Class 4A runner-up in 1998.
Few are expecting much from the Wildcats in this year’s state tourney, which Buslee said doesn’t bother them.
“We can compete and win at state because we can execute better than a lot of teams,” he said. “We might not be the most physical or athletic team, but we can win games with confidence and execution.”
McKenzie disagreed with a suggestion the Wildcats could be “loose” in the state tournament because of an absence of pressure.
“I don’t want them to be loose. I want them to be confident,” he said. “We’re going to be the underdog against whoever we play, so they’re going to have to say, ‘Let’s just go battle.’ We played in the toughest conference (South Suburban) in the state, in my opinion. We played top-10 teams all season, so no one’s going to make us nervous.”
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