SoCalHoops Tournament Update

adidas Double Pump Best Of Summer
Final Round: Jazz Win Championship--(July 26, 1998)

Bottom line first:

The New Orleans Jazz beat the DC Assault team, 90-75 for the Best of Summer Championship.

The Third Place game didn't happen. When Inland (which lost in the semifinal to the Jazz) found out that Abbey AC (which had lost to DC Assault in the other semifinal) had left to catch an early flight out of town, Inland also went home too, back to the super secret Inland Empire. So nobody finished in third place. Or they both did, take your pick.

Today was the final day of play, and it was both a great day and a strange one, as the teams whittled themselves down to the final two, and the coaches in attendance also whittled themselves down to the final two. As noted above, the final two teams left standing were the Jazz and DC Assault. The final two coaches left standing when it was all over were Brian Hecker, assistant at Wisconsin, and Ray Lopes from Oklahoma. Actually it was three, the guy from Memphis who never leaves the Jazz team's presence.

Earlier in the day, EBO took a fall to Inland, and then Mats, Boozer and the rest of the EBO guys skipped town, as did a lot of the other teams. The biggest MIA was FOH I, which didn't show for their game against Valentino's at 12:50; fortunately though, FOH IV did show, and they played a game against Mira Costa, losing by two at the buzzer to a very young team coached by Glen Marks. Plainly, most of the teams who left early did so to get a jump on the traffic or to catch earlier flights out of town, either to get themselves finally home, and for some, to return back to Vegas in preparation for the start of the Las Vegas Grand Finale which starts Monday, July 27, 1998 and goes on until the end of the month. And frankly we can't blame some of these guys. By about 4:00 p.m., almost everyone had endured about all the basketball a human being can possibly withstand, considering that the "games" have now been going on non-stop for more than a month, at a three-a-day clip.

But again, at least two of the favorites stuck around to fight to the finish, as the New Orleans Jazz and DC Assault squared off in the championship game, and the Jazz gave the DC Assault a good, old-fashioned butt-kicking, winning 90-75.

Actually, the game didn't just seem one-sided, it really was, and the Jazz dominated in scoring, rebounding, steals, assists, assist to turnover ratio, and they even got more technicals than DC. Which is not to say that DC isn't a good team; they are. But DC got off to an incredibly slow start, and the Jazz got going really really fast, with Chris Duhon scoring the first 10 points before DC ever got on the board. The Jazz were just unstoppable, and Duhon, Dupree and the rest of the Jazz proved why they were the best team at the tournament with a very impressive, relentlessly fast-paced game.

Oh yeah. For WestCoastHoops' Michael Miller: Hey, Mike, you owe us tickets to that premier, buddy. Remember that on Thursday we told you the Jazz would win and not DC Assault :-0).

The Jazz are a very quick, very tall, and physically adept and athletic team, much more so than DC Assault, at least they were today, especially with DC missing Keith Bogans (does he ever show up anywhere besides Vegas?) and Joe Forte (he wasn't on this roster, but has been one of their stars in the past). And there were actually too many "stars" on the Jazz team to really single out one as the MVP, but if we had to pick, we'd say it was Co-MVPs: Chris Duhon (6'-1" Sr. PG) for his great offense, and Ronald Dupree for his impressive scoring and shot-blocking. Duhon scored 15 points, including 3 threes, 4 assists, three rebounds, and one of three technicals called in the game. Dupree had 18 points, 7 rebounds, 2 steals, and played a phenomenal game both offensively and defensively, with some pretty spin moves, and a couple of thunderous dunks.

The Jazz just run, and run and run, and DC, which also likes to run, wasn't fast enough for them, and looked dazed and confused at times. Especially Dermarr Johnson, who struggled mightily in the first half, and finally calmed down enough to start scoring in the second half. DC did have its share of scoring, but not soon enough to make a difference. At the half, the score was 47-29, and the closest DC ever got was 10 early in the second half, as David Holmes (6'-6" Jr. F)-- one of the scariest looking players around with his Don King 'doo-- went wild pulling down 14 points, one steal, three rebounds and one crazy blocked shot. But just as quickly as Holmes got hot, so did Dupree, scoring 8 of his 18 in about 4 minutes in a great run in the second half.

Everyone scored for the Jazz in this game. Derrick Zimmerman (6'-2" Sr. G) had 14 points, and had 3 rebounds, Thomas Davis (6'-7" Sr. F) scored 11 points, Andy Slocum (6'-11" Sr. C), a big, slow-footed kid who's being recruited by Kansas and a bunch of other schools, scored 5 points, Jonathon Bender (6'-11" Sr. C) scored 11 points and had 3 blocks and 5 rebounds, Courtney Trusk (6'-4" Sr. G) scored 4 points, had one steal and got one of the other technicals assessed to the Jazz, while Rickey Bennett (6'-2" Sr. G) had two steals, 2 points and a couple of assists. Marcus Patton (6'-6" Sr. F) from Ruston, Louisiana scored 6 points all in the first half, and had one block and two rebounds, also all in the first half.

DC actually was looking a bit dazed from the constant onslaught, and it was pretty amazing that the Jazz could actually still have legs as fresh and quick as they were after what has been more than a solid month of daily basketball. Dermarr Johnson (6'-9" Sr. F/C), DC's top name attraction, did not look great, partly because he wasn't surrounded by greatness as were the Jazz players, and partly because he just didn't play very well. Sure DC is a good team, but they are just not a great team as currently constituted. No question that they've got five or six, possibly ten high D-1 players. But so do the Jazz. And the more Dermarr tried to over-compensate for the barrage of scoring by the Jazz, particularly by Duhon and Dupree in the first few minutes of the game, the worse it got, and the more frustrated and out of control he seemed to be, dribbling from the top of the key, trying to penetrate, arms and ball going one way, legs and feet going the other way. Occassionally you saw flashes of the Dermarr Johnson who lit up the Double Pump Spring Discovery Shootout, and who played in the Championship game what seemed like an eternity ago when DC Assault beat the Texas team. But this was really a different Dermarr, and the exhuastion and the grind had taken its toll. Dermarr is still a good ball-handler, and a tremendous talent. But today at times he was trying to do it all himself, which just wasn't going to work against a team like the Jazz. Dermarr's performance, when the stats are considered, was impressive, but it just wasn't enough to overcome a 20 point lead. Dermarr finished with 12 points, one steal, three blocked shots, and 7 rebounds.

DC's other players also scored: Val Brown (5'-11" Sr. PG) from Robert E. Lee, didn't wake up until the second half, scoring only 2 points in the first half, and then hitting for 11 in the second, but he did have two assists, one steal, and he got the third technical assessed (actually it was a double techincal which went along with Courtney Trask's T). Jamal Brown finished the game with only two points and three rebounds, and just never really got going. Derick Payne (6'-6" Sr. F) had 9 points (only two in the first half), two steals and one rebound, a terribly off game for him. Bernard Robinson (6'-6" Jr. G/F) from Dunbar had 13 points, one blocked shot, one steal and three rebounds, while Troyce Haynesworth (6'-4" Sr. G) also from Dunbar only managed two points and two rebounds, all in the first half. Al Miller (6'-0" Sr. G) from Maine Central, didn't score at all, and neither did Brian Chase (5'-10" Sr. PG). And Cliff Hawkins (6'2" Jr. G) from Oak Hill Academy only had 9 points (2 in the first half), but he did manage two steals, one rebound and one assist.

The real key to this game seemed to be that DC didn't play team offense or defense, while the Jazz really coalesced as a unit, and their subbing pattern (new players coming in every two minutes) really kept them fresh. The Jazz play intense pressure man-to-man defense, always looking to trap, press and get up on the man with the ball. On offense, they prefer the run and gun style, but when forced to go to a half-court offense, actually run a pretty good facsimile of an offense. Given their ability to run the break, they were frequently two or three players ahead of the ball on both ends, and they out-rebounded, out-blocked, and out-shot DC, taking advantage of the speed and height differences.

Cheap-shot observation: The most amazing thing was that with two of the most talented teams in the country squaring off, the large Dominguez gym was only about 1/250th full, which is to say, there were maybe 200 people in the whole place (which seats about 8,000) and that was including the players, staff and the refs. But that's really to be expected, since as the other teams who aren't in the final game are eliminated, they really don't want to stick around, and they (and their fans, parents, and others who attend) leave town.

In any event, it was a great final, big time fun, and it ended just in time for us to be able to make it over to Long Beach to see the final of the Slam-N-Jam NIT between NYC Riverside Church and the Bay Area Ballers I. We'll have a report about that one shortly.

For now, we want to congratulate all of the great players, coaches, fans, Double Pump, Inc., staff, including Phil Bryant and his wife Jan, their son Matt, David and Dana, and everyone else who made this event one of the greatest of its kind. Where else can you see great local talent and the top national prospects all in one place that isn't called Las Vegas? The answer is nowhere else.

And in case you're interested, here's what happened (or at least as best as we could piece the results together) in the other games. We'll have some additional reports on a couple of the other games and our favorite teams and players, , especially Inland, which has some great SoCal guys. But for now, here are the results of the games played Saturday, July 25, 1998. The winners are italicized:

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