After 3 months Xballer League has finally come to an end. Although we lost our final game to finish 3rd Runner Up (4th), this has been one of Ex-UM's best performance in a lomg while.
A lot of the credit must go to Chuan whose youth, size and athleticism makes us a totally different team.
However our success is also due to the development and maturation of players like Ming Lip, Leong, Bik Yih and Juin Haur, giving us much more depth than we've ever had.
Our final game was against Myth again, the same opponent in our 8th game. During our 8th game we only had 6 players and was without Ben, Leong or Chuan. We lost that game by 43 points (51-94)!
Myth was big, physically strong and shot the 3 point shot extremely well.
This time however we had almost all our players (except for Ben). We set the same goal of staying close to give ourselves a chance at the end.
Myth was ultimately still a very big and physically strong team. Whenever the got the ball in the paint, it was virtually impossible to stop them from scoring without fouling.
Pin was also late so we didn't have our usual starting unit. Juin Haur did well stepping up and filling in for Ben but defensively Ming Lip kept missing rotations and we had a tough time on defense.
That allowed Myth to jump out to 19-10 lead after 1 quarter.
When we finally had our front court of Sem, Pin and Chuan on the floor together in the 2nd quarter, we were able to press often, with great success. We quickly closed the gap and trailed only by 3 points at the half (28-31).
And for the second straight game, our bench players also played steady and well (though when Ming Lip and Leong were on the front court, the unit were not effective on the press).
That allowed us to stay close the rest of the game. Unfortunately, we just couldn't stop them when in close and we couldn't quite catch them up.
FINAL SCORE : 55-59
We finished as 3rd Runner-Up / 4th.
Scoring disribution for this game:-
No. 6 Hung - 0+0+2+0=2
No. 7 Leong - 0+0+0+2=2
No. 8 Juin Haur - 0+5+0+5=10
No. 9 Chuan - 4+6+4+2=16
No.10 Pin - 0+0+0+4=4
No. 11 Sem - 4+5+2+4=15
No. 12 Loke Yew - 0+2+0+0=2
No. 13 Ming Lip - 2+2+0+0=4
Having observed our team and compared to other sronger teams, if Ex-UM is to continue to improve, we will have to improve (1) our individual ability to create shot opportunities for each other by being able to dribble penetrate and pass (2) improve our medium distance shot accuracy and (3) perhaps most importantly, improve the speed of our shot release.
Well done Ex-UM!
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