Staff photo / Brian Yauger Badger’s Duncan Moy, who scored 34 points in Badger’s win over Windham, goes up for a layup Wednesday night at Badger High School.

VERNON — It’s been a chaotic month of January for Badger.

Minus two sizable victories over Lordstown and Conneaut, the Braves’ four other games were decided by a combined six points.

That trend continued Wednesday as the Braves went down to the wire with Windham. Badger held strong, forcing Bombers’ senior Chase Eye to take a contested last-second shot that went wide to secure the 66-64 win.

“I feel like the last five or six games have come down to the last second shot,” Braves coach Josh Upshire said. “We buckled down there at the end. I know we had the traveling call towards the end of the game, but for our guys to have buckled down defensively and making them shoot a tough shot at the end was good.”

It’s becoming routine at this point, but Braves junior Duncan Moy strung together another strong performance. Moy tallied 35 points on the night.

He and senior Brad Hamilton are the team’s clear anchors. At this point, substitutions don’t even happen in some games.

“For him and Brad, they don’t even come out of games,” Upshire said. “Honestly they play 32 minutes every night. After every game, I tell my coaches like ‘We’ve got to build in some substitutions for them’, but then when the game comes, we don’t get to make substitutions and they’re playing 32 minutes. So good for those guys to be able to play 32 minutes a night and take the beatings that they take — the guys lean on Duncan and the guys lean on Brad –and are able to withstand it for the most part.”

The win comes at a perfect time as Badger (13-3) is fresh off a 51-50 loss to Heartland Christian at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland. The recovery is a positive sign for a team looking to make a deep run.

“For us to come back and be able to execute defensively what we didn’t execute on Saturday was great for our guys,” Upshire said. “That just shows we’re learning. Like I said earlier in the season, our goal, obviously, is to win games, but we’re trying to get better each game. I feel like Saturday, we missed our assignments. and today we were able to get our assignments covered and make them take a tough shot there at the end.”

While he missed the final shot, Eye put together a great performance. The senior scored 21 points and was a true two-way threat all night.

“We kind of keyed on him, but it’s hard to key on him because he’s so quick and so athletic,” Upshire said. “He elevates on his jump shot, so you can only do so much. You just hope he has an off night and obviously he didn’t have an off night tonight.”

The Bombers fall to 9-5 on the season. They started the game strong, beginning the game on a 7-0 run, and the plan to keep the Braves out of the paint worked. But once Badger started getting hot from beyond the arc, it took a while for Windham to adapt.

“Originally we wanted to try to pack in the key to keep some of their driving efforts to a minimum, but that actually ended up hurting us because we didn’t do a good job scrambling out to shooters early on in the game,” Bombers coach Cody Apthorpe said. “That inevitably led to us falling out of our 2-3 zone because we had given up way too many looks from the outside. But the game plan primarily was to try to put some pressure on the ball full-court and have an effort packing in the key to try to minimize their driving efforts.”

Up next, the Braves take on St. John, while Windham hosts Fairport Harding.