Round 18 – Mighty Kites vs Xtreme

Tonight we took on Xtreme, who beat us by 9 points half a season ago – 14 v 25 in a game that seemed shallow and in a less than sportsmanship manner…. The match tonight seemed to have a bit more integrity, however it still felt a little off overall…
The punchline is that we won, 32 to 30 in a tight last 3 minutes.
The team did feel a little light tonight with WuDan, Jimmy, Jon, Josh and Arthur out, but we did have Gareth tag in to bolster our numbers and supply at least some relief.

Starting out we did the normal weighing up and reading of who their main players were, what their style of offense and defense were and try to come up with counter plays and measures… Highlights of the first half were fairly few and far between, but seeing Gareth dip the ring, almost dunking the ball on a fast break would have to have been it. By the end of the half we were slightly up…

As the second half kicked off and progressed fairly slowly, as is the case in most of our matches, we had the most unfortunate occurrence of Geoff hitting the 5 foul mark and being detained from playing the remainder of the match. As things continued on, Xtreme started to get desperate in trying to gain and retain the lead and so they started to kick up the defensive pressure by running a full-court press, something they were well resourced to do with a fairly large team and plenty of substitutions on their bench roster. This seemed to work for a fair while as the pressure became a bit much for us to handle forcing a number of turnovers, not so many resulting in points for their team however, due to lack of accuracy or good defensive recovery on our part. But after a timeout and an encouraging word we managed to slow things down to our own pace, drop the pressure off a bit and recover to maintain our lead, although I paid a slightly hefty physical price with plenty of pushes resulting in me on the ground. The last one being a big push over the sideline upon catching an inbound pass in the last 2 minutes of the game, putting their team fouls at the magical number 8 meaning that we got to go to the free throw line for 2 shots, which I didn’t realise as I blew off some steam. The shots were taken by Nima, who took plenty of time to prepare, and put us at three points ahead with time on the clock for only one play. This play happened to go to a foul as they were shooting, taking their player to the line, however he only made one of those shots after the buzzer had gone.

On a personal game note, I was pretty satisfied with my performance, despite not scoring any points. I’d only really had opportunity for maybe 5 or so shots, mostly which I’d ended up faking and then passing, although one was a poor attempt at an alley oop shot. Defensively I did well to overcome a fair few obstacles, the big one being screened ALOT!!! and also covering the top half of the key by myself a fair amount of the time…

That concludes the 2nd round of competition, meaning that we’ve played all teams on the roster twice. Our standing on the ladder is approximately 3rd with a slight buffer between 4th and 5th. The next 2 rounds are a 3rd playing of 2 teams before we hit the semi-finals and then the with any luck the Grand Final. So it’s a late 10:15 game next week against Midnight Gamblers who we should be able to beat again. Not too much time to come down and cheer us on, and hopefully see an exciting game of basketball!!