Looking back on a game, it’s often easy to pinpoint when the momentum shifted, and the result became almost inevitable.
Thursday night, in a tough preseason matchup between the UFV Cascades men’s basketball team and the University of Windsor Lancers, that critical moment came with 26 seconds left in the fourth quarter, when Cascade Kevon Parchment was called for over-and-back.
Parchment had retreated to the backcourt to rescue the ball from an attempted steal with his team up by a point 56-55. The Lancers would score on the resulting possession to take a 57-56 lead, and eventually rode that score into victory after UFV failed to convert in the final nine seconds.
“We played some solid defence,” said Cascades coach Adam Friesen. “Offensively we’ve got a way to go. We’ve got to improve.”
The Cascades suffered from some critical mistakes late in the game after outscoring their opponents 22-12 in the third quarter to jump ahead 44-39. It’s not often that neither team breaks 50 points in a university-level men’s basketball game until the fourth quarter, but with both teams shooting significantly less than 50 per cent from the field it was destined to be a low-scoring contest.
Parchment and Nate Brown led the Cascades with 16 and 15 points respectively. Manjodh Dulay was key to UFV’s third-quarter run, and finished with nine points (shooting an efficient 4-5 to defy the general percentages).
Rotimi Osuntola was the Lancers’ scoring leader with 16 points and five offensive rebounds.
“We’ve got to make better choices about where we want to go with the basketball,” said Friesen. “We’ve got to sprint harder, we’ve got to play faster. We’re playing too slow, and a little bit too much one-on-one at the moment…It’s just early, our second CIS game, and mistakes are typical this time of year.”
The Cascades experimented a little on offence, moving point guard Dominique Brooks to the wing, and giving ball-handling responsibilities to Dulay and Vijay Dhillon. Still, it was on the glass that UFV really showed vulnerability as they were outrebounded 15-8 in the frontcourt. The Lancers scored their final decisive basket on a play kept alive by three consecutive offensive rebounds.
The Lancers were 16-8 last season and made a playoff run into the Final Four of the Ontario University Athetics (OUA) conference.. The Cascades made a similar run to the Canada West Final Four. Both teams lost both their semifinal and consolation final games at their respective conference championship tournaments.
