Taking advantage of a 27-point third, top-seeded Pure Youth Construction defeated the Dacin Tigers 84-77 to take Game 1 of the championship series at the Kaohsiung Arena last night.
All five of the Builder’s starters scored in double-digits, in a battle where the Tigers could not focus their defensive effort on any single player, making it virtually impossible to stop the defending champs.
Pure Youth also showed off their speed in a deadly transition game, with a good portion of their offense coming off easy baskets form fastbreaks to run the Tigers off the floor.
“We really did a super job in our transition game, which gave us the advantage,” Pure Youth top scorer Tsai Wen-cheng said after the game.
The soft-spoken forward netted 19 for his team to take the scoring burden off fellow center Quincy Davis, coming up big with several clutch shots to keep his team’s once-dwindling second-half lead to at least six for the biggest part of the fourth quarter.
Nine first-quarter points by Doug Creighton helped Pure Youth take a 21-18 lead after the opening quarter against a resilient Dacin squad that seemed capable of matching the Builders in every facet of the game.
The Tigers sustained their effort to keep pace with Pure Youth in a hard-fought second quarter, in which they managed to keep the deficit at five with a strong defensive rebounding effort.
However, their luck ran out in the third as the Pure Youth transition game sparked a 10-0 run to give the defending champs their biggest lead of the game, 18 points.
Even though Dacin managed a 7-0 run of their own in the early part of the fourth fall and came as close as six on another late-game rally after Pure Youth were called for unsportsmanlike conduct, the outcome of the game was never in doubt as Pure Youth regained their composure to hold off the Tigers.
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