Above are the detailed game stats for the boy's game 1 vs UPM last Sunday including player individual stats with individual shot chart, turnover analysis and team stat analysis.
Our team captain Lew Chee Ching #13 as usual gave us his usual double-double, this time with 18 pts + 15 rebounds (10 on offensive end!), even though he did not shoot well from the 3 point line.
Both our usual 2nd top scorers, ex-captain Jensen Lim #7 and (current year's) co-captain Jinn Wen were limited as Jensen was struggling a bit with the flu whilst Jinn Wen suffered a bone contusion on his right knee fairly in the game. Jensen could only go short stretches for us because of his flu and we shut Jinn Wen down early in the game when we thought his movements on court were not his normal gait. Despite the flu, Jensen contributed 5 points whilst playing his usual excellent defense, though we had to hold Jensen's minutes to just 15 minutes (well below the 20-24 minutes we expect to play him). Jinn Wen also contributed 5 points and 8 rebounds despite his even more limited playing time (11 minutes).
Heng #4 stepped up big, shouldering Jensen's minutes as well as his own and had an excellent game, contributing 16 points, with many inspiring and big 3 point shots, with 3 assists and a team leading 5 steals!
Hau #12 has now been dubbed Ginobli-Hau as he was virtually unstoppable one-on-one with "Ginobli-like" head / shoulder fakes and impossible looking drives to the basket, making him our 3rd highest scorer with 15 points as well as playing his usual aggressive and hard-working defense, getting a team high 6 deflections and 7 rebounds.
Meantime, Raymond #15 and Min Jia #8 both stepped up and shared the responsibilities of covering Jinn Wen's minutes, with Raymond playing very aggressively and drawing foul after foul on UPM and Min Jia continuing to show his ability to knock down open 3 point shots,forcing UPM to stay honest on defense and unable to provide help defense.
Our veteran Kelvin #11 who had been struggling lately with his shot, showed signs he is regaining his touch (contributing 10 points) but better yet, he took my advice to him (that he can contribute and be effective for our team in so many additional ways, not merely shooting) to heart and played excellent aggressive defense and crashing the boards hard each and every possession getting 8 rebounds, 6 of which on the offensive end!
Both our point guards Amirul #10 and Jack #9 played excellently, running our offense smoothly and efficiently no matter which combination of player was on the floor.
Overall, the team performed well achieving or getting close to many of our team goals. We got off 99 shot attempts (our goal is 100), maintained a high offensive rebounding efficiency of 46.6% (our goal is 50%), taking good care of the ball with only 12 turnovers (our goal is to keep to 8-12) and achieving a 0.9 point per possession offensive efficiency (our goal is 1).
Our shooting percentage is still a bit short of our goals (2PT @ 37% - goal 44% and 3pt @ 18% - goal 35%) but we certainly shot much better than recently in UCBL by still being aggressive in taking shots but now also assessing whether we are "open" before shooting. Our aggressiveness on offense also shows in the number of free throws we attempted (38) as compared to UPM (18). However, as rightly and astutely pointed out by Fwuji in his comments below, our Free Throw % definitely needs improvement!
At the same time, our aggressive defense caused 32 turnovers, 2/3rds of which we created by our steals and aggressive defense whilst holding UPM to just 28% FG% and more importantly limiting them to only 65 shot attempts! That means we got to shoot the ball 34 more times than UPM!
Well done to all our boys. A good first step for our boys but it is still ultimately that (and our boys fully understand it) : a first step.
Our journey continues today against UMS at 3:30pm.
Come support us at UPM or support us in spirit and in heart from wherever you are at!
