The Pilgrim boys’ basketball team took home the Warwick Beacon Holiday Tournament title last week with a win over Warwick Vets in the championship game. The Pats rolled past Toll gate in the opening round while Vets punched its ticket to the finals with a 68-57 victory against Providence Country Day, marking the Hurricanes’ first win in more than a year. The ’Canes couldn’t match that success in the finals though, falling 73-51 to a hot-shooting Pilgrim club.

The Pats shot just better than 50 percent from the floor in their championship win over their city rivals but it was the team’s defense that set the tone from the start. Pilgrim forced nine turnovers in the first eight minutes of the contest and utilized a man-to-man press to make things difficult for Vets.

“We played well overall,” Pilgrim coach Ross Callen said. “Our defense is very consistent and that is our main thing this year. We’re forcing a lot of turnovers and doing really well there, which has helped us a lot so far. We’re aggressive on defense. We’ve got a lot of guards so we try to use that to our advantage. We can run a lot of man and play full-court to take advantage of our quickness.”

The Pats led by as many as 20 points in the first half but a 9-2 surge from the ’Canes in the closing minutes made it 37-24 at the break. Vets appeared poised to claw its way back into contention before an 8-0 Pilgrim run broke the game open right after halftime.

Pilgrim kept up its solid defensive play and, despite being outsized by the ’Canes, controlled the boards. The Pats hauled in 35 rebounds in the game, with 21 coming on the defensive end, and used their transition game to stay a step ahead of Vets.

“Vets is obviously huge, they have a few guys out there who are about 6’5”, but our guys did a good job of boxing out and putting a body on somebody,” Callen said. “We also scored a lot of points in transition. We work on that a lot in practice and they’ve done a really nice job with it over the last couple of games.”

Junior James Pina led all scorers with 20 points for the Pats while senior Kevin Cormier added 19. Cormier scored 33 points over Pilgrim’s two tournament wins, with Pina totaling 30. Dylan Guerrero finished with 19 points in the tournament and senior Tyler Pina scored 15 points.

The championship proved to be a frustrating loss for the ’Canes, who were coming off their first win of the season.

Vets downed PCD with a complete team effort in the tournament opener. Junior Cory Muto tallied a double-double with 13 points and 10 rebounds against the Knights and senior Mike Jackson grabbed a game-high 15 rebounds and six points. Adderly Lopez led Vets with 19 points in the win.

“We were very happy with that win,” Vets coach Chris LeBlanc said. “We played together as a team, we moved the ball well and we got the result that we’ve been looking for.”

But the ’Canes couldn’t match that effort in the finals. Vets’ slow start put the team in an early hole and their uneven play prevented the kind of rally that the ’Canes needed to come back.

“We came out flat against Pilgrim, which was surprising,” LeBlanc said. “Pilgrim is a good team, and I don’t want to take anything away from them, but we didn’t do the things that made us successful against PCD or Classical. We were like a totally different team out there.”

Vets suffered a blow on the interior when Jackson went down with an injury in the first half and the team labored from the floor. The ’Canes shot just 31 percent and, with Pilgrim controlling the paint, Vets didn’t benefit from many second-chance baskets.

“We couldn’t box them out,” LeBlanc said. “We weren’t getting rebounds and it didn’t seem like we got too many rolls either. We had our shots but they weren’t going in the basket. We only shot 26 percent from the paint in the first half.”

Vets took on Toll Gate last night and will host Tolman [1-1] on Friday at 7 p.m. Pilgrim will look to carry its tournament success back into the Division II regular season when it travels to Ponaganset [1-1] on Wednesday. The Pats will play Scituate [2-0] Friday night. Both games will tip-off at 7 p.m.

“We want to take it one game at a time,” Callen said. “We think that we have a chance to do well this season but we don’t want to look too far ahead. Now we’re going to get back into our league games and we’ll see how it goes from there.”