Saturday: Final
City Oilers 86-59 Patriots
Rwanda’s Patriots Basketball Club will have to wait another year for an attempt at winning the FIBA-Africa Zone V Club Championships.
Uganda’s City Oilers successfully defended the title after beating Patriots 86-59 in the final of this year’s tournament at Lugogo Indoor Arena in Kampala on Saturday evening.
However, Patriots’ head coach Henry Mwinuka has promised to comeback stronger next year.
“Obviously we are very disappointed but I hope next year, we will do better and go a step further. The competition is getting tougher every other year, next year we need to put in more effort,” Mwinuka said after Saturday’s defeat.
The Tanzanian trainer admitted that, “The game was hard for sure. My guys were tired. Most of our shots were off all night. We tried our best but failed.”
“Last year, we lost in the semi-finals and this year we reached the final and if you look around, we did our best to win but City Oilers are a very good team,” he explained.
City Oilers point-guard, Jordin Mayers was the star of the game, putting up 21 points while Adarius Pegues hit 14 points and 13 rebounds. Mayes was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player (MVP).
From the start, City Oilers showed that they were determined to defend their title when they went 8-0 in the lead but Patriots too showed that they were not ready to go down easily and ended the first quarter 22-20 down.
Amidst cheers from the home crowd, the defending champions scored 26 points and restricted their opponents to 18 points in the second quarter to take a 10 point lead at the break; 48-38.
Patriots looked to be clueless with everything going wrong for their side as star players Kami Kabange and Hamza Ruhezamihigo continued to fire blanks and eventually trailed by 18 points going into the last 10 minutes.
In the last quarter, the Oilers slowed the game’s tempo as Patriots looked helpless allowing the opponents to score 17 points before sealing off an 86-59 victory. Patriots’ Aristide Mugabe and Elie Kaje collected 17 and 11 points respectively.
City Oilers will once again represent the Zone V at the 2017 FIBA-Africa Club Championships.
In the semi-finals, City Oilers held off KPA 73-65, while Patriots beat the other Ugandan side Betway Power with Kabange and Walter Nkurunziza leading the way with 17 points each.
Two Patriots players, Mugabe and Kabange were named on the team of the tournament—others were; Mayes (Oilers), Stanley Ocitti (Oilers) and Betway Power’s Mike Makiadi.
Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) also retained the women’s title after winning all their 6 games of the competition.
Equity (Kenya) finished second while home favourites Uganda Christian University (UCU) finished third. Rwanda’s APR finished in the 5th position ahead of Don Bosco of Tanzania and Horseed of Somalia.
Source: The New Times Rwanda.