UBC Basketball News

Hi Everyone,

This past weekend we were once again on the road and played two games down in Oregon. For everyone else in the Canada West it was the start of conference play but we had the BYE weekend.

On Thursday we headed out on the journey to Eugene, Oregon.

We wanted the guys to attend at least half the day of school so we departed at 12:45pm on our way to Northwest Christian University.

Traffic was horrible and it took us a long time to just get out of Vancouver and as those living on the Coast know, the border was another hour wait putting us in the middle of Seattle rush hour traffic.

Needless to say, it took us 10 hours to get down to Eugene. Our game on Friday looked like we had travelled and it was not a pretty game. Right from the opening tip we made mistakes and battled ourselves.

They had one 6’9” University of Oregon transfer who was very good and he had his way with us.

He ended the game with 25 pts and 12 rebs. It was our poorest shooting stats for the year and it was the first time that we had been out-rebounded in a game this season.

Statistically, we ended the game shooting 1-12 from beyond the three point line and only had three offensive rebounds.

It felt like we had no legs and overall we looked very lethargic. We were down most of the game but we made a run part way through the fourth quarter to cut the lead to five but we could not get any closer than that. Final score NCU 76 – UBC 60.

Stats Leaders

Tonner Jackson – 18 pts, 4 rebs
Jordan Jensen-Whyte – 13 pts, 5 rebs, 4 assts
Conor Morgan – 12 pts, 4 rebs,
David Wagner – 10 pts, 4 rebs

Right after the game on Friday we got back on the bus and headed North a couple of hours to Portland. On Saturday we chose not to use our shooter time and instead had a team meeting followed by a team video session.

After the team video session each coach met with a couple of players to discuss their play and help to establish some goals.

We felt that this would help focus the players on the next game and also help them to focus on our season goals.

That evening we played Concordia University – Portland. They are a traditional powerhouse and have six seniors on this year’s team. It was obvious, even in warmup, that our guys were very focused and ready to play.

We started the game strong and played tough. Kedar Wright was still out with bruised thigh and Stef Fasianos was injured in Friday’s game when a player landed on him and injured his back, that left us with nine dressed players.

Concordia led for the first third of the game but it was a back and forth battle with a lot of turnovers from both sides. The 35 second shot clock seems like an eternity when you are used to 24.

Needless to say, we didn’t have any shot clock violations in either game and they are a team that likes to press and play very scrappy.

It is very hard to get set in any form of structured offense but we did manage to control the tempo for the second third of the game.

We didn’t do as good of a job with tempo in the last third.

That proved to be the difference. We led at half and led by 5-7 points the majority of the second half.

With under 30 seconds to play in the game we turned the ball over and they scored to put them up one point. It was their first lead of the second half.

We had the ball with 15 seconds left. After a timeout we executed very poorly and ended up having the ball knocked out of bounds with 0.5 of a second left on the game clock.

We did manage to get off an unbalanced shot, but it did not go in. We lost 62-61. It was a tough loss but it was a much better performance than the night before. It was easy to say that we lost that game… they didn’t win it.

We had far too many turnovers and our execution down the stretch was not good enough.

In order to be successful teams have to play in adverse situations.

On Friday we did not handle things well but Saturday we showed some real positive signs against a very good veteran team.

Although we lost the games, they served a great purpose and that is, we learned and we will get better because of that trip.

Thanks to UBC for the info.