By Bill Kiser
bkiser@salisburypost.com
OLIN ó Carson head coach Brian Perry wasn’t particularly happy with his team’s performance Friday night against North Iredell.
The end result? That’s a different matter, as the Cougars pulled away in the second half to beat the Raiders 62-46 and win their third straight NPC game.
Darius Moose scored a game-high 18 points and pulled down 11 rebounds, Nick Houston added 17 points and Josh Doby 10 for Carson (10-10, 6-8), which moved to .500 for the first time since the opening weeks of the 2008-2009 season.
“No, it wasn’t pretty, but we don’t care,” Perry said. “We’d obviously love to come out here and look good, and do everything exactly right. But we didn’t, but we won.”
The Cougars ó despite turning the ball over 20 times ó did it by holding the last-place Raiders (2-15, 1-13) to just 27.7 percent shooting, while shooting better than 46 percent themselves (25-for-54).
“We had some spurts in there where we got after them defensively,” Perry said. “We missed a whole lot of easy shots, especially some foul shots in the first half that could’ve given us some separation. But we talk about finding a way to win.”
Moose was quiet in the first half, scoring just eight points and pulling down four rebounds. Despite that, Carson led 32-21 at halftime.
But after North pulled within four points early in the third quarter, Moose began to assert himself. He fed Houston for a layup to kick off a 10-point run, and capped it by laying in Doby’s behind-the-back pass for a 44-30 lead.
Moose then picked up another assist on Brandon Ferrare’s layup for a 50-34 lead through three quarters.
“We challenged (Moose) and the team to come out with some more energy, and he did,” Perry said. “He came out in the second half and got the rebounds that got us off on the fast breaks.”
The Cougars led by as many as 20 points twice in the fourth quarter óearly in the period when Moose hit back-to-back buckets to put them up 54-34 with 6:21 left, and again at 59-39 on Houston’s runner in the lane with 3:42 left.
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NOTE: Moose came out of the game with 4:23 remaining after he hit the floor hard while battling for a rebound with North’s Ryan Sharpe. Moose stayed on the bench the rest of the game with an ice pack on the right side of his face. Perry said he had a small cut under his right eye. carson (62) óMoose 18, Houston 17, Doby 10, Clanton 5, Ferrare 4, Begic 4, Harden 2, Ramic 2, Jones, Sewell, Barringer, Holloway, Britt, Walser.
north iredell (46) ó R. Sharpe 15, K. Sharpe 8, Jordan 6, Pharr 6, Ward 3, Laney 3, Haynes 2, Pierce 2, Sloan 1. Carson 16 16 18 12 ó 62
N. Iredell 11 10 13 12 ó 46