Not all of LaMelo Ball’s points this season have come on long-range jumpers. The Chino Hills sophomore also has drives into the lane, such as this one vs. Crespi. Photo: James Escarcega.
LaMelo Ball of Chino Hills is just becoming part of state record-breaking era at Chino Hills, which includes his older brothers and his teammates who are helping the Huskies score 100 points 33 times now in the last two seasons combined. We have more on last week’s 92-point game vs. Los Osos, more details from the 100-point state record from 2003 and comparisons to other huge single-game records in both boys and girls basketball.
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For the writeup on LaMelo Ball’s 92-point game the night it happened, CLICK HERE.
Anytime a player scores 92 points or more in a high school basketball game — boys or girls — it’s always a little bit of a sham. There’s just no way to do that given the limited time unless there’s a lot of cherry picking by the player scoring the points, letting the other team score to get the ball back or applying constant pressing on the defensive end for turnover after turnover.
It’s more the constant pressing that has occurred in some of the most famous girls single-game scoring that we’ve seen in state history, such as Cheryl Miller (Riverside Poly) with 105 points or Lisa Leslie (Inglewood Morningside) with 101 in just one half.
In sophomore LaMelo Ball’s 92-point game from earlier this week for Chino Hills, it was like a wrestler letting the other guy escape for one point so he could quickly get a takedown for two more. In watching some highlights of the game, Chino Hills wasn’t winning by such a blowout margin over Los Osos of Rancho Cucamonga that it was questionable to be leaving Melo in the game, but at the same time the Huskies were ahead by enough so that they could basically let their opponents score quickly so they could get as many possessions as possible themselves. They also fouled quickly to get the ball back for additional scoring chances. It all added up to a 146-123 win, which also set a Cal-Hi Sports state record for most points by two teams in one game.
The next day, columnist Bill Plaschke of the L.A. Times tracked down the only boys player in state history to score more points than Ball in a single game — Tigran Gregorian from Mesrobian of Pico Rivera with 100 points in a 2003 game against Pacific Christian of Los Angeles — and uncovered that Gregorian is not the correct spelling of his name.
For all these years, since the L.A. Times reported it as Gregorian at the time and no one ever contacted them or us at Cal-Hi Sports to correct it, that’s the way it showed. It’s actually Gregoryan, who currently works in commercial real estate in downtown L.A., and he also told Plaschke that he and some friends went through the scorebook later that week and discovered the total was 102 points, not 100. Since that book is lost and the 102-point total can’t be proved, however, it will stay as 100.
Grigoryan and head coach Vikan Karapetian weren’t chastised that much at the time for the player being allowed to score 100 points in the team’s 114-47 victory over Pacific Christian, although the Pacific Christian head coach refused to shake hands.
Mesrobian only had five players in uniform so Grigoryan couldn’t come out and it also didn’t generate as much controversy because of the size of the schools and there was no social media yet.
This was real small school hoops we’re talking about. Most single-game records are from these type of schools, so small that games have been played on blacktops outside or in tiny church gyms, which was the case for Grigoryan. At the time of Grigoryan’s record, Mesrobian had an enrollment of 49 students in three grades. Pacific Christian was listed at the time with 65 students.
Will we ever break down single-game records into large school and small school categories? No, but it’s easy to look at the actual list and know that Melo’s 92 could certainly be called the large school state record. The only one that comes close from a large school was the 82 points scored in 1995 by the late Winters Patterson of San Francisco Balboa in a 128-109 win against Skyline of Oakland.
Then there’s the simple process of adding perspective. During the same week that Grigoryan scored his 100 points in that game, California’s eventual Division I state champions from Westchester of Los Angeles and a team led by a future NBA player (Trevor Ariza) went to an event in New Jersey and lost 78-52 to St. Vincent-St. Mary of Akron, Ohio. Yes, that was LeBron James’ team and in that game LeBron scored just as many points by himself (52) against our state’s best team. What’s more impressive? On that same point, Melo himself had a more impressive game by scoring 36 points in a close loss to national power Oak Hill Academy than he did by scoring 92 against Los Osos.
MORE STATE RECORD UPDATES
*In Chino Hills’ 105-75 win over Rancho Cucamonga that wrapped up the team’s regular season, LaMelo Ball scored 27 points. That gave him a back-to-back total of 119, but his back-to-back total using the Oak Hill performance (36) is higher at 128. That also means the state record for most points in two games of 129 set in 1990 by Mike Fisher of San Marino Southwestern Academy (remember what we were saying about real small schools above) is still the record. LaMelo and brother LiAngelo both are second at 128.
*That 100-point game for the Huskies vs. Rancho Cucamonga also was the team’s 15th 100-point game of the season. This year’s team is ahead of the pace of last year’s that tied the state record of 18 100-point games that was set in 1996 by Balboa of San Francisco. Last year’s team at Chino Hills had 13 100-point games at the end of the regular season.
*We never had a half-by-half breakdown of Gregoryan’s 100-point game, but in Bill Plaschke’s column it was reported at 53 in the first half and 47 for the second half. We had never believed it was more than 60, but it’s now for certain that LaMelo Ball scoring 62 in the second half vs. Los Osos will be listed officially as a new state record. He also set a record with 41 points in the fourth quarter.
Managing editor Ronnie Flores also contributed to this post. Mark Tennis is the co-founder and publisher of CalHiSports.com. He can be reached at markjtennis@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow Mark on the Cal-Hi Sports Twitter handle: @CalHiSports
