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LAGUNA NIGUEL, Ca. – The state’s best team and best player kept plowing toward an unbeaten season, state title and California Player of the Year honors Friday night.

Other highly-ranked CIF Southern Section teams and players didn’t find the sledding quite as smooth in the latest round of playoff action, however.

Santa Ana Mater Dei, the No. 1 seed in the Southern Section’s new “Open Division” of the playoffs, got 42 points from the aforementioned lock for POY honors – University of Arizona-bound Stanley Johnson – en route to a 77-59 quarterfinal win at Lakewood Mayfair that pushed the Monarchs to 29-0.

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LONG BEACH, Ca.  – The Pangos Junior All-American Camp, held this past weekend at Cabrillo High, once more provided an insightful look into the future – both short- and long-term – of high school hoops in the west.

Southern California, the Bay Area (east and west), Sacramento and Washington were particularly well-represented, as were Utah and Arizona

Approximately 140 players – including a few as young as in the fourth and fifth grades – took part, with the festivities capped by Sunday all-star games on the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade levels, as well as a “Best of the Best” game made up 21 eighth-graders and three seventh-graders.

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LOS ANGELES – Calling it “The Greatest Showcase on Earth” might have been a more than just a tad hyperbolic.

But the last of the major regular-season high school hoops “one-day events”, played host to by Cathedral High Saturday, was a day well-spent by those who participated and watched the action.

The finale proved “grand”, indeed, as an undermanned Corona Centennial club rallied from seven points down at intermission to knock off the host team, 72-63, handing the Phantoms their first loss to a California club this season.

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LOS ANGELES – “The Greatest Showcase on Earth”, a one-day, seven-game boys’ hoops event, tips off Saturday morning at 10:30 at Cathedral High, tips off at 10:30 Saturday morning.

Rancho Dominguez High (from Long Beach) faces Rosemead Bosco tech in the opener.

In the finale, two strong contenders to play in the CIF Southern Section’s new Open Division in the playoffs (19-2 Cathedral and 21-2 Corona Centennial), are scheduled to tip off at 7:30.

The entire schedule: 10:30 a.m., Long Beach Rancho Dominguez vs. Rosemead Bosco Tech; Noon, Middlebrooks Academy vs.

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SANTA ANA, Ca.  –Three of the top seniors in the country put on marvelous displays for their Southern California teams Saturday during Saturday’s marathon nine-game, 15-hour and second-day session of the 19th Nike Extravaganza at Mater Dei High.

The trio combined to go for 2-for-3 in the victory department, though.

*USC-bound guard Jordan McLaughlin had a slow scoring start, missing his first five shots and only scored via a breakaway dunk near the end of the first half.

But he, over the final 20 minutes (the third and fourth quarters, and an OT), he was nothing short of stunning, scoring 30 of his day-high 32 points to help Etiwanda rally to a 62-53 victory over Bellflower St.

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