Bibby, Rhymes lead Shadow Mountain to rout of St. Edward in opener

Between the last name and the skill set, Michael Bibby draws his share of the focus.

Fans want to see if the 6-foot-3 Shadow Mountain guard plays anything like his father, former NBA and current Matadors coach Mike Bibby. That much is something the entire team is used to. But if there’s bonus point to the legacy on the roster, it’s that maybe opposing coaches outside the state of Arizona are concentrating only on the younger Bibby.

“It’s always like that,” senior J.J. Rhymes said. “Michael’s a very good player. He shoots, he attacks and he passes. He gets everyone open. That’s just what he does. Everybody else feeds off him.”

In an 85-52 win over St. Edward (Ohio) in the opening round of the Beach Ball Classic on Monday, Michael Bibby certainly did his part. He scored a game-high 21 points and had eight assists. Shadow Mountain’s other pieces, though, also did theirs.

Rhymes, much like he did a year ago when Bibby was out with a knee injury, took on a scoring role of his own, dropping 20 points to go along with five rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal. Jaelen House, the son of former NBA player Eddie House, chipped in 12 points.

By the 11-minute mark of the first half, Shadow Mountain led by double digits and never looked back. Eventually, St. Edward removed most of its starters and started preparing for the consolation bracket.

“I think they forget about our whole team,” Mike Bibby said. “No one really gives credit to our team. I think we’ve got an all-around good team. We’re 10, 12 deep. A fan was screaming for me to put my subs in. It wasn’t going to make a difference. When I put my young guys in there, they’re pressuring all up the court. That’s just the way we play.”

The combined effort overwhelmed the Eagles. The 2006 Beach Ball champions dropped to 4-9 in their three-plus tournament appearances since, and coach Eric Flannery knew that this year’s event wasn’t going to be easy.

St. Edward, he said, returned just three points per game of last year’s scoring. The Eagles’ run-and-gun style also took a hit when it connected to just seven made 3s out of 36 attempts.

“When you’re not making them and playing a really good team, you’re going to get run out of the gym,” Flannery said. “We come down here for one or two reasons. We just want to get closer as a team and bond. Two, we want to play the best teams we can possibly play, win or lose. The last three times we’ve been here, we’ve been 1-2. We won a state championship or lost in the final four each of those three times. [Against Shadow Mountain], this was embarrassing. We got our butts kicked. But that’s going to make us better.”

The flip side of that is that the Matadors – who moved on to a second-round game against Bartow, Fla. (7 p.m. Tuesday) – have some momentum early after a 1-2 finish of their own last year. It was then that Bibby was on the bench with the knee injury, and Shadow Mountain was still finding itself.

With him back alongside his teammates, Shadow Mountain expects better results.

“We were a broke team last year when we lost Michael at the beginning of the season. We didn’t know our identity,” Rhymes said. “As soon as we got Michael, we knew were confident about ourselves. … We come in to fight. We came in to win. We didn’t come 2,000 miles to lose the first two games. We came here to win the championship.”

This story was originally published December 28, 2015 at 9:10 PM with the headline "Bibby, Rhymes lead Shadow Mountain to rout of St. Edward in opener."