SoCalHoops Tournament News

Nike National Championships:
Big Fun In The Big Top As Belmont Beats SCA--(Aug. 1, 1998)

If you've never been to the High Five America --SportCenter facility at United States International University in San Diego then you just won't get the "Big Top" reference. If you have, then you know exactly what we mean. It's just like a circus tent. Six separate basketball courts all under one roof, clean bathrooms, good snackbar with something other than bad hot dogs and nachos, nice offices for the staff and "media", and friendly staff as well. Only thing their missing is balloons and cotton candy.

But they did have an acrobatic show, and it was mostly put on today by Tito Maddox, who single-handedly (well, ok, he did get a little help from Eric Knight, Albert Miller, Terry Hosendove, Ellis Myles, Travon Bryant and Osa "Skip" Esene) hammered the vaunted Southern California All-Stars.

Let's cut to the bottom line right away: First the "Big" games, the two in the Championship bracket for those four teams still in the hunt for the Championship: Belmont Shore won the biggest game of the day by defeating Southern California All Stars in one of the semifinal games, as Tito Maddox had the game of his life and Casey Jacobsen missed a huge three pointer at the buzzer, to give Belmont the win 72-70.

In the other semifinal, QBL lost by three points in the last few seconds after leading by three and then by one with less than 30 seconds to play. QBL got a last second look at the basket as Jason Kapono shot a three which didn't go in, and then Apolinar Fernandez got the rebound, but was unable to score, as QBL fell to the Illinois Warriors 64-67.

So the final is Illinois v. Belmont Shore, tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., and unfortunately we won't be able to witness it in person (is there any other way when the game isn't televised? Maybe telepathy??) because we have to be up in Santa Barbara to attend the first day of the second session of Snow Valley Camp at Westmont College, and also to drop in at Michael Jordan's Camp at UCSB. But Dinos and Aerick Sanders have promised to fill us in on all the details, and we'll get the stats faxed to us within minutes of the end of the game, so we should be able to have them up by early evening if all goes well.

In the Belmont v. SCA game, here are some random impressions about what we saw, followed by the stats, so you'll know what really happened. We know what the stats say, but we just don't believe some of what they say even though the numbers do add up.

First, the SCA team came out for their warmups about three or four minutes before Belmont did. The reason was that Dinos Trigonis, who coaches Belmont was busy lobbying (as he had been for the prior hour) to get Ollie Goulston of the High Five America organization (who are the tournament organizers) to allow Dinos to play Chris Osborne. Seems that Jack May either got hurt the first day, or for some reason left, and the same thing happened to Kam Walton and Mike Malloy, so the Belmont guys thought they were undermanned and sent for reinforcements. Dinos drove back to LA, picked up Chris and Osa "Skip" Esene and they were both ready to go. Only one little problem, Osa was on the original roster turned in to High Five before the tournament started, but Chris wasn't, so Ollie and the High Five guys (probably correctly) decided that Chris was not going to play. Dinos wasn't mad, but he was pushing pretty hard to get everyone and anyone to side with him, but Ollie wasn't going to be moved.

And as it turned out, it really didn't matter, because SCA really wasn't better than Belmont, at least not today, and at times, it looked like the highly touted and much-feared Southern California All-Stars didn't even belong on the same court as the Belmont guys. Why do we say this? Not to be mean-spirited, or overly-critical, because the SCA guys are really fine athletes, but we say it because it was simply true: This particular group of "Southern California All-Stars" really doesn't seem to have the chemistry and cohesion that last year's or this spring's SCA team had, and it showed today, as the various factions and groups who have played together on different teams never quite gelled into a single unit.

Also in this game, Dinos had a coaching edge he usually doesn't have, because he was coaching against one of his best players, Casey Jacobsen. If you haven't seen Jacobsen play at his best, then you really can't judge his game by what happened today. He did manage, at least according to the stats, 13 points, but to all of us who watched the game, it seemed as though he only had about 4 the entire game, and that those were on free-throws. Honestly, we've never seen Casey have such a bad day.

And we've never seen Tito have such a good day. Oh, Tito has scored more points than the 20 he scored today, and he's had more than 6 assists, and we'd bet he had less than the two turnovers he had today, but we've never seen him just take over a game the way he did this one. We'd venture to say that there probably isn't a point guard in SoCal, or the entire West Coast for that matter, and maybe even the entire country, including Chris Duhon (who just might end up playing with Tito and that's a scary team to think about) who can beat his man off the dribble and break down a defense so consistently and so mercilessly. He has amazing ability change speed and direction, and today he was even better offensively than Baron Davis at his best. He was flying, slashing, floating and in general running the entire show better than we've ever seen him play.

And he seemed to take great pleasure in beating, in succession, young Keilon Fortune, who couldn't hang with him, then Wesley Stokes, who could almost but not quite hang with him defensively, and then Casey Jacobsen, who really is not a point guard and whom Pat Barrett (at least in our humble opinion) shouldn't have matched up against Tito as he did for most of the third and the entire fourth quarter.

And then there was the little matter of the defensive set run by Belmont. Before the game, we sat with Tito, Ellis Myles and Compton assistant coach Gary Miles who also assists Dinos in coaching the Belmont team. Before the game, Gary Miles told us "We're going to try to shut Tyson Chandler down. If we have to run a 'box and one' to do it, we're going to shut him down."

So the defense was designed not to shut down Casey Jacobsen, but to key on Tyson. One little problem though was that it had an interesting effect: SCA was unable (or didn't even try) to set any screens, much less any double screens, so Casey never really got to do what he does best, and that's catch and shoot coming off a screen. In fact, we didn't see that happen all day with him. And at the end of the game, after it was all over, Casey was mad. Really mad, and he didn't appreciate the box and 1 stuff, because for the most part, instead of trying to get the ball inside to Tyson, they were trying to get it to Casey on the perimeter (although not off of screens) so the box and 1 had the effect of denying him the ball for most of the game. And when he got it his shot was off, and he was, well, in a word, pissed. We do know that he and Dinos spoke after the game, and all appeared to be well, but there was about 32 minutes and a couple afterwards where it looked like Casey would really go off on Dinos if he'd been able to find him.

We also saw Eric Knight and Skip Esene, and Ellis Myles hammering Tyson inside early and often. And it worked initially as SCA took more than three minutes to score it's first basket. With 4:04 to play in the first quarter, the score was 14-2, Belmont. Tito sent the message early, and he kept sending it throughout. Albert Miller did his share too, scoring 19 points and grabbing 12 rebounds, twice as many as Tyson in almost the same playing time. Ellis played some of the best ball we've seen him play, scoring 14 points.

And while Aerick Sanders didn't get a whole lot of PT in this one, only about 11 minutes, he did manage 4 HUGE blocked shots, and we counted about three rebounds (the official stats say it was only one rebound, but they lie, really, they do).

Terry Hosendove didn't show up much in the stats, but he was just a huge factor, playing great defense, getting 4 rebounds, and in general harrasing the daylights out of anyone in a grey and white SCA uniform.

We were very impressed to see just how much improved Wesley Stokes is, not that he needed much improvement, and we'd have to say that he's also one of the top points in SoCal; not quite the athletic type of player that Tito is, but a really good, smooth point guard who understands the game, looks to pass first, gets everyone involved, makes good decisions, and is a fluid and in-control player, the kind of guy who makes others around him look better.

Keilon Fortune has also improved, and his passing is excellent, but he does need to work on his decision-making a bit. But for a guy who's only going to be a sophomore, there aren't many who are better.

If we have one question about the SCA defensive alignment today, and if we could do it our way, we would have had both Keilon and Wesley in at the same time, and doubled Tito, hit them back with the box and one with some speed to spare, instead of trying to matchup Casey with Tito. But then that's why we don't make the big bucks or at least that's why we don't coach these teams, but Pat Barrett does. And he has won just a couple of major tournaments and AAU National Championships, so maybe he does really know what he's doing. :-0)

Anyway, by the fourth quarter, SCA had managed to battle back, largely on the bask of Keith Kincaide, who scored 18 points, most of them in the second half, and Travon Bryant's offense spurt of 12 points, and his great defenseive play. So with about 2 minutes to play, Belmont is up by about three, like they had been for most of the fourth quarter, always threatening to blow the game wide open, making two baskets, then SCA would come right back with two of their own. With 1:24 showing on the clock, the score was 70-66, and all Belmont had to do was stall, since there was no shot clock in the game. But after SCA made a basket, they brought Darius Sanders (6'-5" Fr. F) into the game for the first time. He immediately double teamed Eric Knight in the backcourt with Keith Kincaide on the inbounds, and together they forced a turnover, and Kincaide was fouled going up for the shot, sending him to the line shooting two. He made the first one, and the score was 70-67. Kincaide then missed the next one, Darius grabbed the rebound, went into the lane and finished the shot and was fouled. Darius then made the free throw to tie the game with about 23 seconds showing on the clock. On the subsequent inbounds, the ball went (where else?) to Tito, who calmly brought the ball upcourt, as the seconds ticked away, and when the clock finally got down to about 10 seconds, he drove left, reversed, backed up, when right side, jumped about 10 feet from the basket on the right baseline, and let go a shot which had such a high arc it actually entered two different time zones before it dropped into the basket without touching either the rim or the net. Swoosh. Two. Belmont 72, SCA 70, with 7.2 second remaining on the clock, and enough time to actually run something.

SCA, however, did not call a timeout. Instead, the refs momentarily stopped the game just long enough to send Wesley Stokes sprinting off the floor and across the gym to the trainer for a band-aid to stop a very small amount of blood which was coming from a cut on his right hand near the index finger. Everyone thought that SCA was going to call a time out to wait for Wesley to get back. But no, instead they put Keilon into the game in his place, and immediately brought the ball inbounds. Keilon took about 4 seconds just getting the ball up to the midcourt, and then when he had a wide-open look, suddenly must have realized there was almost no time left on the clock. He saw Casey in the right corner, having run baseline from left to right, and he was wide open. Casey took the final shot, and, yes fans, Mighty Casey struck out. . . oops. Wrong game. Actually the shot hit the rim and came darn close to going in.

And that's how Belmont ended up in the finals. Tomorrow we'll find out if they live happily ever after.

We'll do a separate report on the QBL game, and also all the other scores and details of the other games we saw, but for now here's the box score from the Belmont v. SCA game:

Again, we've got more coming up so hang in there.

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