An Alley Oop To International Hoops #3
Yessir, the Tall Blacks grabbed their first win of the FIBA World Cup and we're still in with a sniff!
The lads came out and played much closer to their potential and managed to outscore Ukraine in 3/4 of the quarters to finish up 73-61 winners. This was on the back of a pretty hot game from Everard Bartlett who nailed 4/5 3-pointers on his way to 14 points while Kirk Penny top scored with 17 points.
When trying to describe the Tall Blacks to my Chinese flat mate, I tell him that the spirit and heart that they play with is the foundation. They'll be competitive thanks to the fact that they're kiwis and they go out and give it their all, their basketballin' ability is the cream on top of that. We've seen glimpses of it through the early stages of the tourney, but last night we got the best display of what the TB's can do.
When you've got Isaac Fotu coming off the bench to shoot 5/6 2-pointers in 25 minutes, that's more than handy. We still haven't seen an almost complete game though, but that's probably more encouraging than anything as they, and we, know that there's much more left in the bag. They play Finland tonight in a must win match, which you'd have to think we'll go into with a fairly decent chance of dominating ... especially after the encouraging display against the Ukraine.
Team USA will play Ukraine, which you'd assume will be a win for the Americans while Turkey and the Dominican Republic will also fight it out. That means that ideally it would finish with Ukraine, Turkey/DOM and NZ sitting on 7 points with the kiwis getting the benefit of a head to head tie breaking win against Ukraine. Boom.