LANGLEY — The offence of the South Fraser champion Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers has been eye-popping this week here at the 2025 B.C. junior boys basketball championships.
And when you ascend to that place where both shooting the three and attacking with gusto form a perfect duo of unpredictability, you arrive at a place where threats imagined are just as lethal as the real thing.
In other words, what happens when a Tweedsmuir team with a reputation for volume threes decides that it will instead pack one side of the scale a little heavier with, say, dribble-drive slices to the rim?
That’s what happened Sunday.
The Panthers dropped six well-timed threes as a team, very low by their standards, but made up the difference with a frisky floor game that generated 30 free-throw trips (22-of-30).
Yes, the essence of the game will always be deception.
“Always, when you get the ball, you have to be a threat,” said LT head coach Raj Bagry, whose offence seemed to keep No. 5-seeded Vancouver College off kilter and far from its best game.
“If you’re not a threat and they don’t come out (to guard), then you don’t open up the middle, and if we don’t open the middle, we can’t play. So we have to open that middle up so we can actually get some layups.”
Of course, you don’t have the kind of season the Panthers are enjoying unless you know how to play to your strengths. Tweedsmuir, which beat the Irish for the second time in two meetings this season, surely does.
“We have to drive, we have to shoot,” Bagry continued. “If you don’t shoot, and I don’t care if you’re far from being the best player, there’s no bad shot. The only thing bad is the turnover, so shoot the ball.”
In the case of the team’s gloriously talented guard Gurtaj Hayer it meant shooting a perfect 12-for-12 from the stripe en route to a game-high 22 points. Hayer can shoot from the outside but his explosive first step off the dribble is memorable.
Jaideep Athwal, another standout talent, had 16 points. Maahir Julka added 15 and Shae Kaila 10.
Vancouver College got 19 points from Ethan Chiu, 11 from Ren Hetherington and 10 from Marko Maric.
Of course, as usual, that’s only half the recipe.
LT has played as inspired a brand of two-way basketball as any team in the field, and its level of pesky pluck has been hard to miss.
“Just get in their bubble, get underneath their nails,” Bagry said of what the goal of his team’s defence is every game. We’ve got to get underneath them. We can’t just stay back and let them dribble.”
The next test comes in the form of the No. 1 Argyle Pipers. The Panthers face the North Vancouver team, the tallest in the provincial JV ranks, in a 6:30 p.m. semifinal on Monday.
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Howard,
I enjoy your coverage immensely. I graduated from Lord Tweedsmuir back in 69, and back then we were not known as a basketball powerhouse in the Cross Mainland. Fast forward to three years ago, and the Panthers have become a phenomenal program, thanks to a seismic shift in demographics. As a basketball official in Victoria, I always consider it a great pleasure to watch them or ref a game involving their teams. Great coaches.