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SoCalHoops Tournament News

Team Los Angeles Loses
In First Round Of Playoffs--(Aug. 20, 1998)

The Los Angeles 15-16 Maccabi Basketball team, which featured six players from last year's Gold Medal 13-14 team from Seattle finished first in its pool, going undefeated. That is until today, when they faced a fairly strong Suffolk team, which features 6'-8" Justin Simon, a big time player with a big time future, and his coach tells us he's just a sophomore, which is pretty impressive since he weighs about 225, and most of that looks to be muscle.

LA was never in sync, and played what can only be described as selfish and not very smart basketball. We won't go into all the details now, but suffice it to say, that other than a few bright spots (Adam Drell's scoring and rebounding until he fouled out at a critical juncture with only three minutes left to play, Chad Garson's three point shooting, and Darren Freedman's perimeter shooting, and Eric Geffner's great defensive effort) this was a pretty ugly game, and at the half, LA actually trailed 27-11. This was a game that LA was going to lose, probably deserved to lose, and in fact did lose, but not before they pulled within 2 points with less than one minute to play on great three point shooting by Chad Garson, who was just on fire. But at a critical juncture, with left handed Josh Lewis (6'-5" Jr. F) rebounding and shooting on the left side of the basket, not only did he have his shot blocked, LA committed a foul, sending Suffolk to the line, to make it a 4 point game, and then within another 10 seconds, Suffolk led by 6 as LA missed yet another shot.

We'll try to have the stats for these games tomorrow. For now though, this will be the first time in more than 10 years that LA will not have a team in the medal (Bronze, Silver or Gold) round.