PSAL QUARTERFINALS
Johnny Mathis gripped his head in his hands in dismay when he saw Stephen Malcolm fire a 3-pointer in the final minutes of Kennedy’s quarterfinal game against Grady.
“I was hollering, ‘No, no, no,’ ” the Kennedy head coach said. “But he hit some huge shots for us.”
The sixth-seeded Knights needed both of them to hold off No. 14 Grady, 77-69, in the PSAL quarterfinals yesterday at Hunter College. They play No. 2 Frederick Douglass, a 53-47 winner over tenth-seed Manhattan Center, in the semifinals.
“I was open, so I took it,” said Malcolm, who scored six of his eight points in the game’s last two minutes. “I had a bad game, so I wanted to make up for it.”
Kennedy needed him to.
Unlike championship-caliber JFK teams of years past, this one doesn’t have stars destined for major college basketball like Willie Shaw or his son J.C., who guided the Knights to their last city title in 2000.
Kennedy is now just one game away from getting back to the Garden because of its well-balanced roster. While Amaury Fermin is the team’s top player, it was Malcolm who hit the key shots yesterday.
His effort helped the Knights hold off Grady, which had tied the game at 66-66 with 2:41 to go after trailing 60-51.
Fermin, along with teammate Dwight Hardy, scored a game-high 18 points. No basket was more important than his driving layup with 2:26 remaining to put the Knights up for good, 68-66.
Still, it wasn’t until Malcolm’s late shots – the first gave Kennedy a four-point lead and the second answered a Damien Santana trey – that JFK sealed the victory.
“I had confidence that he would hit those shots,” Fermin said. “He’s hit shots like that before.”
Malcolm’s late-game heroics put the Knights in the semis, where they haven’t been since 2000. And while many of the team’s players have remained under the radar, Fermin expected nothing less than a chance to end his four-year varsity career with a title.
“We’re not surprised by this,” Fermin said. “We can compete with anybody, even if no one else thought we could.”
