Super Basketball League play is to resume this afternoon with Taiwan Beer taking on Kinmen Kaoliang at the Sinjhuang Sports Complex in New Taipei City.
It is a must-win situation for the Distillers, who need to take both games over the weekend and hope for a Dacin Tigers loss in their remaining game in the regular season for the best of Kinmen to qualify for the upcoming playoffs, as they trail the sixth-placed Tigers by half a game.
Kinmen would lose out in a tie should both clubs finish with identical win-loss marks based on their losing head-to-head record (2-3) during the regular season.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
“It is do or die for us; any way you look at it, we must win both games,” Kinmen Kaoliang head coach Wu Chun-hsiung said earlier this week. “We don’t want to pack up and be done for good.”
The first-year handler has guided his team through some ups and downs over the course of the season, placing as high as No. 4 in the standings as recently as early last month before dropping seven straight games to fall out of the top four.
For the Distillers to win, Player of the Month for last month Bryan Davis needs to have a good showing, distributing the ball offensively, since he will likely be double-teamed by the Brew Crew defense and someone else must rise to the occasion to pick up the scoring slack.
As for Taiwan Beer, who need to win at least one of their two remaining games in the regular season to lock up third place, this is definitely the easier of the two.
In the second game, the Cats face the Yulon Luxgens, who would love to begin the Year of the Sheep with a big win over their archrivals following their upset win over top-ranked Pure Youth Construction two weeks ago to close the Year of the Horse on a high note.
Big man Norvel Pelle of the Tigers will have his hands full guarding the Automakers’ inside threat Herve Lamizana, who has averaged more than 23 points and nearly 10 rebounds per game in the four games he has played since joining Yulon earlier this month, his second tour with Yulon.
In the final game of the day, the Builders face Bank of Taiwan, winners of five consecutive games, with last week’s Player of the Week James Tyler and Coach of the Year favorite Hung Chun-che on the Bankers’ side.
Even though Pure Youth might have a better team as far as the statistics and records are concerned, this could be a game the Bankers steal from them, since the Builders have already clinched a top-seed berth in the playoffs and will likely give their reserves more floor time.
The inside of the paint will likely be crowded, with two of the biggest players in the league, Tyler and the Builders’ Garret Siler, pushing and shoving their way around.
“I don’t remember the moment, but ever since I was a kid, that’s the first thing I loved,” two-time NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas said of his lifelong romance with basketball. However, that journey unfolded against the limitations of his size in a game where height often dictates opportunity — a reality he confronted throughout his career. At 175cm, Thomas is less than 2cm taller than the average Taiwanese adult male, while NBA players during his career stood at about 200cm on average. Compared with the NBA’s average career length of less than five years, Thomas’ 13-season career stands out as
Dakar and Rabat have longstanding ties, but relations have been strained since the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) final, which Senegal won in mid-January before being stripped of the title, which was transferred to Morocco. Now, the AFCON trophy is something of a thorn in the two countries’ sides. On Rue Mohamed V, the street where Moroccan vendors are based in the Senegalese capital, a police van is parked. “The police have been on high alert since the Confederation of African Football [CAF] decided to award the title to Morocco, but there have been no incidents,” a local resident said.
Hans Niemann declares he would become a “stone cold killer” in a Netflix documentary released on Tuesday about his feud with five-time classical world champion Magnus Carlsen, a pledge that injects new edge into the lingering fallout from the cheating scandal that shook elite chess. “I’m gonna be a stone cold killer the rest of my life,” the US’ Niemann says in the film. “I’m going to become the best player in the world, and no one is going to believe that now, but this clip will play over and over again in 10 years — just wait.” “I just
Top seeded Jessica Pegula on Friday once again fought back from a set down to reach the WTA Charleston Open semi-finals with a 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 win against Russia’s Diana Shnaider. Defending champion Pegula has lost the first set in all three of her matches at the tournament so far, but again dug deep to maintain her hopes of retaining the title. The world No. 5 from the US took 2 hours, 10 minutes to defeat 19th-ranked Shnaider, relying on a formidable service game that included eight aces. Shnaider battled well in the first two sets and broke early for a 2-0 lead
RSS