– Courts Pacesetters failed in their bid for revenge against Ravens while the Linden and Georgetown U-23 teams entertained
It was supposed to be the night when Courts Pacesetters would exact revenge on Ravens for their 17-point defeat in last year’s Georgetown Amateur Basketball Association (GABA) Open Knock-out tournament but instead Courts Pacesetters were handed another sound whipping.
This time, Ravens flew past Courts Pacesetters by 20 points (69-49), Saturday evening at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall in the Wind Jammers International Hotel in conjunction with the GABA $100,000 winner-take-all grudge match.
On the same card, the Linden Under-23 team was too strong for their Georgetown counterparts romping to an entertaining 92 – 83 points victory.
The feature game failed to live up to the pre-game hype as the Ravens players, from jump ball, were all over the court, even as the Pacesetters players put up a lacklustre effort.
To add insult to injury, Ravens played without point-guard and team captain Darcel Harris and aggressive centre Damien Liverpool while Pacesetters had its full school of players including Naylon Loncke who missed the last game.
Ravens power-forward Dwayne ‘Brown Sugar’ Roberts once again proved to a menace in the paint with the ‘Setters’ big men, Kurt `Gypsy’ Elias and Royston Siland finding no answer for him.
The first quarter ended 22 – 10 in favour of the victors and the first half ended 39 – 25.
Ravens’ defense in the third quarter was superb as they shut out the Pacesetters players to end the quarter in the driver’s seat 51-39.
The crowd at the sports hall waited for one of those classical surges from Pacesetters but it was one of those nights when the Ravens were just in no mood for a tight ending.
Gullen led the scoring attack for Ravens with 16 points while Rodwell Fortune scored 12 and Roberts and Kevin Lawrence 11 points each.
For the losers, Elias banged in 16 points, Siland 12 and Travis Burnett 10 points.
Pacesetters’ marksman Stephon Gillis could not even buy a basket while Loncke scored only one point.
As expected, fans were kept on the edges of their seats when the Linden and Georgetown Under-23 ballers clashed.
Armed with three of the country’s best young players Akeem ‘The Dream’ Kanhai, Orin ‘Six Head’ Rose and Chris Williams, Linden took the game to Georgetown from the get-go and never looked back.
The game certainly lived up to all the trash talk that preceded it and fans got their monies worth.
At half time the score was 42 – 40 in favour of Linden but determined to win at home, Georgetown kept themselves in the game through centre Yannick Wade, forward Tyron Hamid and guard Travis Burnett.
But the element of surprise for Linden was their big man, Shane ‘Little Monster’ Webster, who was a terror inside.
Webster produced one of the night’s highlights when he collected the ball in the paint from a Rose pass, and in one motion he slammed it hard over the heads of a few city players.
But the best was yet to come.
While Georgetown was on a comeback in the fourth quarter, Kanhai, who was in his usual dominant form, collected the ball in the back court and using his sharp crossover dribbles to evade a few defenders, the national junior captain went coast-to-coast before soaring towards the ring and finishing with a hard tomahawk one-handed dunk.
It was exactly what the appreciative crowd came to see and that, along with some excellent shooting from Rose and Williams, was more than enough to keep Linden on a roll over Georgetown.
Rose finished with a game-high 29 points, splashed with some long range, on the money three pointers, while Kanhai had a crafty 24 points; Webster netted a dogged 13 points while Williams had 11.
For the city men, Wade hammered in 29, Hamid had 20 and Burnett chipped in with 13 points.
The two matches on Saturday evening also marked the opening of the GABA season for 2010 and last night, a triple header marked the official start of the Open and third-division round robin Leagues.
