If the Granger boys don’t defend the back door any better in SCAC play than they did in Monday’s Tourneytown.com Shootout against Freeman, the Spartans will be returning to the SunDome for the Class 1A tournament by the front door.

Granger's R.J. Solis takes the ball past Freeman's Scott Ferguson during the first half of their Tourneytown.com Shootout game Monday.   SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic View the Shootout photo galleries.

Along with the rest of the ticket-buying public.

The Freeman Scotties, meanwhile, figure to be coming in via the pass gate — i.e., the back door, the same route they used to perfection in their 58-40 drilling of the Spartans.

“We knew that, with Granger, they like to pressure the ball a lot,” said Freeman senior Andrew Dresback, who picked up many of his game-high 22 points — and three of his four assists — on back-door plays. “We’ve had that play a couple of years, and with Granger pressuring the ball the way they did, with that back-door cut and guys going to the basket, it was working really good.”

Scotties coach Mike Thacker, whose 9-4 team has now won seven of its last eight, called his team’s offensive execution possibly its best of the season — especially the back-door cutting.

“We work pretty hard at it,” Thacker said. “We got a lot of plays that ended up in back doors. The kids executed it really well — they finally executed it to a T.”

Of course, the Spartans didn’t help their own cause by shooting a consistently abysmal 23 percent for the game — 6-for-26 in the first half, 6-for-26 in the second.

But what hurt even more was that, because the bulk of Freeman’s shots came from inside after all those cuts and crisp passes, the Scotties sank more than half of their shots.

“We were a half-step slow,” said Granger coach David Gibb, whose team fell to 8-4 with its second consecutive loss. “Everything we normally do well on defense, we didn’t do. We weren’t jumping to the ball, we weren’t bumping the cutters, we weren’t cutting guys off — they were going point A to point B without too much opposition.”

The somewhat-taller Freeman squad — the Scotties’ edge was about 1 1/2 inches per man — also dominated the rebounding (43-23) and had defensive hands in the face of any Granger shooter. But even the open Spartans couldn’t shoot a lick — they were 0-for-12 on 3-pointers, normally a Granger strength, and missed a third of their 24 free throws.

“Three things,” Gibb said, ticking off what beat his team. “The back door. We missed too many missed layins. And we missed too many free throws. But our effort was there, at least. It was much better than last Saturday (in a 62-36 loss to Zillah).”

Effort, but not execution. That was the sole property of Freeman, with 18 of the Scotties’ 25 baskets coming as the direct result of an assist pass. (By contrast, Granger had just five assists.) The scoring margin might have been even wider were it not for Mario Mengarelli’s 14 points and six steals — the latter a Shootout record. But Mengarelli, like his teammates, couldn’t hit his shots, going 3-for-12 from the field.

“This was a learning experience for us,” Gibb said. “Because those guys are a good team.”