Taiwan Beer tames Sina Lions

Four straight three-pointers by Lin "the Beast" Chih-jeh (林志傑) in the final quarter championed a 12-0 run by Taiwan Beer to turn what had been a seesaw battle against the Sina Lions into a 76-63 victory on Sunday.

The win extended the beermen's winning streak to five games and prevented what would have been an embarrassing loss to the last-placed Lions, who are still looking for their first victory of the season.

The Lions played toe to toe with the high-flying beermen for 3-1/2 quarters before the lack of experience, in the form of the younger players' reluctance to take the big shots late in the contest, ultimately cost them the game.

"Our younger guys just wouldn't take the shots towards the end, so all they [Taiwan Beer] had to do was double up on me and Liu Yi-shiang (劉義祥),"

Lions' point guard Luo Hsing-liang (羅興樑) said after the game.

Luo, with 22 points, was the only player on the Lions' squad to score in the double digits.

Elsewhere in the league, both the Yulon Dinos and the Videoland Hunters had a relatively easy time over the weekend as they each won convincingly with lopsided victories over the ETTV Antelopes and the Lions and Bank of Taiwan and the Dacin Tigers, respectively.

Dinos 80, Antelopes 66

Friday's game between the Dinos and the Antelopes was a foregone conclusion by the halftime show as the tenacious Dinos attack took a 40-20 lead at the half and built it to as large as 63-38 by the end of the third quarter before the Antelopes made things look somewhat respectable with a 28-point fourth quarter in the 80-66 final.

Dinos' big man Tseng Wen-ding (曾文鼎) grabbed eight offensive rebounds en route to a double-double night (14 points and 11 rebounds).

As for the Antelopes, other than shooting guard Yang Yu-ming's (楊玉明) 27-point effort, the rest of the club was no match to a Dinos defense that held them to under 35 percent shooting from the floor.

Dinos 99, Lions 76

The offensive-minded Dinos picked up where they left off in Saturday's contest against the hapless Lions when they shot 38-for-71 from the field to score 99 points for the game.

Tseng and his frontcourt mate Chou Shih-yuan (周士淵) could do no wrong as they combined for 44 of the Dinos' 99 points, three more than their previous season-high mark of 96 in a game against the Bank of Taiwan a week ago.

Eleven different players made it into the score book, reflecting the amount of playing time that the Dinos bench saw.

Hunters 89, Bank of Taiwan 68

Not to be outshined by the Dinos, the Hunters also turned in a pair of impressive wins over the weekend by hammering the bankers in Friday's 89-68 decision and Saturday's 88-79 trouncing of the Dacin Tigers.

The wins breathed signs of life back into the Hunters, which had lost its shooting touch for two straight games while sustaining back-to-back losses for the first time in the season.

Small forward Yang Tseh-yi (楊哲宜) and veteran center Lai Guo-hung (賴國弘) worked the inside-outside game to perfection for the Hunters by firing from the outside when the bankers would bunch up against Lai down below to defend the low post area and scoring easy lay-ups inside the paint when the bankers were drawn out to shut down Yang's perimeter game.

Hunters 88, Tigers 79

The Lai-Yang tandem continued its mastery over their opponents in the Hunters' showdown against the Tigers on Saturday, accounting for 47 of the Hunters' 88 points.