ST. PATRICKS 78 TAMANAWIS 72
By HOWARD TSUMURA
LANGLEY — We may live in an era of three-point shooting, yet what if a head coach, over the course of devising his team’s defensive game plan decides that there is actually an even bigger threat present than a wide-open, wide-eyed shooter with the green light to let it fly from distance?
That was the dilemma facing St. Patricks Celtics head coach Nap Santos heading into Saturday night’s Tsumura Basketball Invitational Super 16 championship final against the Tamanawis Wildcats at the Langley Events Centre.
The stakes?
Clean and clear bragging rights to the winner as the best overall senior boys basketball in B.C. after the first two weeks of play in a game that pitted the Quad-A No. 1 Wildcats out of Surrey against the Triple-A No. 1 Celtics out of East Vancouver.
Yes, it’s early… it’s barely December on the timeline to March Madness, yet such cut-and-dried opportunities, over a first 14-or-so-days of play in which teams have universally taken turns beating each other up don’t always materialize like this one did: In the final of an immensely talented 16-team field, following the same ‘four games in four days’ format of the provincials, in the same facility the provincials will actually be contested at in three months time.
So with that scene setter out of the way, it’s time to address the bottom line from Saturday’s championship final, one in which St. Patricks won 78-72 on the shoulders of complete team effort at both sides of the floor with a gutsy, risky, iffy but ultimately successful decision to pretty much give Tamanawis free reign to shoot the three-point shot over the entire length of the fourth quarter.
The reason?
The Wildcats’ 6-foot-11 post-forward Luka Guzina was so automatic off post entry that virtually any touch he got in the block was going to result in an instant two points… with no impunity from a potential three points should St. Patricks’ undersized defenders attempt to toy with the notion of bringing physicality to the fore after post entry had already been made.
So what did they do?
For the largest stretches of a final quarter in which the much smaller Celtics limited the Wildcats to just eight points in the paint (14 points overall) and did not send Tamanawis to the free throw line even once, it deployed a pair of seniors in 6-foot-4 Jemuel Castro and 6-foot Heracles Mai to play a somewhat loose yet readily collapsible double team on Guzina, not an easy task given the increased movement and smarts the big man has brought to the floor this season.
That was half the equation.
The other part of the recipe was to never allow maybe the best baseline corner catch-and-shoot three point gunners in the province, Tammy’s Gurjowan Cheema, to be allowed to launch the kind of rainmakers which would turn the game into a scramble drill on defence for St. Pats.
To that end, eventual tournament MVP Riley Santa Juana, a senior guard who can perform any assignment in the book, was asked to play face-up, shoulder-to-shoulder defence against Cheema throughout the fourth quarter.
Right about now, if you’re counting with your fingers, it of course doesn’t add up.
St. Pats was left with two players to guard three Wildcats.
So what happened?
“That’s what we kind of talked about after the game,” Tamanawis head coach Mike McKay explained after coming out of the post-game locker room. “I think I’m surprised (that we missed so many threes). I mean, that was obviously a big factor in the game. They face-guarded Gurjowan here in the fourth quarter, and we need to do a better job on him of getting him more open. But other guys also need to be able to make a play off of that. If they’re double-teaming Luka, they’ve face-guarded (Cheema), we need to be able to get to the rim. We shouldn’t be relying on threes, and if I had another time out, I would have called one and switched things up there.”
Indeed the perspective McKay brings is accompanied by the fact that St. Patricks play such a frenetic in-game style, one that doesn’t come with a pause- or half-speed-button. And the level of chaos they bring on defence is mirrored by what they do on offence.
In one two-and-a-half minute stretch within the Celtics’ game-changing, game-ending run, it was three straight triples that fell through the irons: first Grade 11 guard Dhyne Cotin, and then back-to-back from Santa Juana, the final shot a deep, quick-trigger, top-of-the-arc offering that came so early in the shot clock that the Tamanawis zone was made to look passive.
That bucket made it 74-65 with 3:12 remaining, the nine-point lead the biggest of the game by either team. McKay used the team’s final timeout at that point, but in end, even with a Guzina three-pointer, the game’s flow dictated that the damage had already been done.
Guzina, the cousin of UBC big man Nikola Guzina, still finished with a game-high 32 points and that speaks volumes to just how unstoppable he has become.
Afterwards, as much as his game is getting better, his perspective and maturity was even more impressive.
“I mean, we started off pounding the ball inside, and then in the second-half, they made that adjustment where they just double- and triple-teammed the post,” he began. “I’ve got to work on being more assertive and getting that ball, and we’ve got to work on hitting those open shots.”
ZONE OFFENCE 101
The other side of the coin?
In a game where the contrasts between the two teams was extreme, what was Tamanawis’ defensive strategy largely going to be?
Playing zone.
To which St. Pats’ head coach Santos said: “We didn’t expect them to play zone.”
Yet ask McKay about a strategy that veered from the team’s norm and came close to working, and you get a good idea why he did it.
“I mean, this is our ninth game in 13 days, so we were pretty gassed and then Luka kind of a banged up his knee,” said McKay. “So I thought, you know, maybe we’d try to slow them down a bit. I’ve watched a bunch of other teams and people try to play man and just get tracked-meeted out of the gym against them. So if we’d try to make them run a little bit of offence and slow them down, try to save some legs for us… But I think at the end of the day, the pace was just a little too fast for us at this point.”
Still, the zone confounded the Celtics early.
They had barely had time to practice against one, let alone one with the height, wingspan and space-eating combination that the Wildcats can bring.
“We had one practice that we were running some zone sets, so when I was yelling out the sets, some of them forgot,” said Santos with a chuckle of what happened in the first half of Saturday’s game, one which the Wildcats led 42-36 at halftime. “So they weren’t really ready for it. So then we just said ‘Let’s keep it simple. Let’s keep our sets simple. Just run one set.’ So we ran one set the whole second half.”
It worked.
No official stats were available, but the kind scribbled on the back of the TBI tournament program by TFSETV broadcast analyst Paul Eberhardt were, and his numbers back up what Santos said.
St. Patricks shot 3-of-17 in the first half from the long line, then with the simplifications made to their zone offence, they went 9-of-15 in the second half.
“That’s 60 per cent,” said Eberhardt, without the aid of a calculator, during the broadcast.
(Editor’s note — Take that, kids)
Santa Juana was confident that the team’s dynamic would eventually allow them to overcome.
“You know, all of us, we’re just all there for each other,” he said. “And no matter who’s missing shots, we just encourage each other to keep shooting. We just have that confidence in each other and in ourselves to keep shooting and we’ll always see it drop eventually.”
The Celtics scoring was so balanced it was hard to say that in the title game one player stood out above another.
Jaiden Quan, so proficient in transition, led the way with a 17 points. Castro and Cotin each had 14. Jericho Labrador came off the bench to score 13 and was skillfully installed as a high-post threat, his read-option ability as a guard put to good use.
MVP Santa Juana had 10 points and while Mai finished with four points, his presence as a low-centre of gravity (although undersized) post was critically essential if only for his ability to begin to slow the pivoting motion of Guzina, a player to which he surrendered 11 inches in height.
For Tamanawis, Anand Sandhu scored 13 of his 16 points in the first half, while Caleb Gomez and Victor Cortel each added nine points. Cheema hit a pair of threes and finished with six points.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
And so a long season has just now begun to sketch an outline of all that is to follow.
TBI will likely have turned the Quad-A, Triple-A and Double-A Top 10s on their collective head by the time the ink is dry in the middle of next week.
And today will indeed be a valuable rest day for teams who have pushed an early limit at invitationals over the first two weekends.
Interesting perspectives from the two head coaches after Saturday’s Super 16 final?
Santos on what he told his players about the reality that over the course of the game as it pertained to Guzina: “I told our guys they’re going to get it in (to Guzina) a few times. He’s going to score his 30. I said, ‘He’ll score 25, 30 points.’ And that’s normal. That’s because he’s so tall, he’ll get his easy buckets. It’s just everyone else… just hound them. Right? And just bother them and be there.”
McKay on the level of marksmanship exhibited by St. Pats throughout the four days of TBI: “I’m not sure there’s a team in the province that shoots the ball as well as they do. Even when we’re in the zone, they didn’t get as many open looks tonight, but if it’s an open look, it’s going in, and that’s why I thought we were tired. We gave Riley (Santa Juana) that wide-open three (77-68, 1:48 left) for some reason. Like, if they’re going to get open looks with their feet set, it’s going to go in. And that’s not the same for every team we’ve seen in this province.”
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