THE DREAM LEAGUE
Asian American / Open Basketball Leagues
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New York Fury 70, Spartans 57 |
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Fury Sends Spartans Packing | |
| May 22, 2008 – Brooklyn, NY (DL) – Easy there, James Choi. You got another game to play tonight. By virtue of an impressive 70-57 win over the Spartans, which eliminated the Spartans from the playoffs, the New York Fury earned the right to play again in one hour against TSIV for the right to face the loser of the Cruisers-Da Bien semifinal game next week. While JC lobbied for the league to push the game to another day, another time, there would be no such reward for his efforts. No sir, you guys are ballers – solider on! And my, while that sucked with just 5 players dressed and none of them named Christian Stevens or Ren Hsieh, soldier on they had to.
How they fared in that game against TSIV will be left for you to click over to in due time, but as for how they fared against the 5th seeded Spartans, we’ll let the story tell itself. It was heady stuff. Looking shellshocked, shorthanded, and just plain silly, the Fury came out like punks, down a man playing 4 on 5, and found themselves trailing 23-13 after one. This is the playoffs, gentlemen. Playoffs! When Roger Redhead arrived and entered the game at the 3:19 mark of the 1st, the Spartans were ahead 13-2, as well they should be. By the end of the quarter, they’d shaved that deficit down a point. Still, no one thought they’d do what they did from there on out. Jeff Moy, who it had been pointed out beforehand, played well against the Spartans this season, continued to do exactly that. Moy was moist with 15 points and 9 rebounds including 6 in the 2nd that started to turn the game around. He started the quarter with a 3-point play and then capped it with a free throw and the Spartans led only 38-32 at the half. In between Moy’s points, Chris Youn and JC had 6 and 5 respectively, and the Fury slowly but surely crept back into it despite some players looking longingly over at the bench for a sub to no avail. The Spartans, on the other hand, had a bench. And their bench played well. In particular, Mark Lee came off of it to deposit 9 points in the 2nd on his way to a team high 13 points. Bench or not however, it was the Fury who looked fresher and springier as the game wore on. Yoshi Kagitomi (11 pts, 8 rbs) kept cutting to the hoop in the 3rd, but Moy forced turnovers (a key area in which the Fury won), Redhead (11 pts, 9 rbs, 2 stls) spurned his usual 3-point ways for 3 baskets inside the arc, and a Youn (19 pts, 7 rbs) triple brought the Fury into a tie for the first time in the game late in the quarter. A Youn 3-point bank shot to start the 4th then gave the Fury their first lead of the game and that was just the shot in the arm that boosted the Fury’s confidence level into another ozone as they blitzed the stunned Spartans the rest of the way with a 22-7 4th. The Spartans simply looked listless, frustrated, and more interested in getting to the off-season than anything else. Every loose ball was the Fury’s. Every call seemed to go their way. The perfect example of how much more the Fury wanted it than the Spartans came when Youn followed his own miss with a tap-in that delighted himself, his teammates, and Hsieh all the way from Shanghai, where he was vacationing before the season even ended! Banglee Takenouchi missed by 1-point from getting all 5 Fury players in double digits. As the Spartans picked up their belongings to head into the off-season and the unknown (other than the fact that Eddie Wang (12 pts, 7 rbs) was headed to Philly for the Chinese Nationals over Memorial Day and Mark Lee is hosting a CK Sports Korean tournament on June 28), Choi kept on barking about not wanting to play in an hour. His tune would change in about 2 hours however. Just you wait and see. |
Score by Quarters
| Team | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | OT | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spartans | 23 | 15 | 12 | 7 | - | 57 |
| New York Fury | 13 | 21 | 14 | 22 | - | 70 |
Boxscore
| Spartans - 57 | |||||||||||
| Player | FG | 3PT | FT | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO | F | PTS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Choi, James | 3 / 12 [0.250] | 1 / 5 [0.200] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 4 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 3 | 7 | |
| Chung, John | 2 / 3 [0.667] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 12 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 4 | |
| Kagitomi, Yoshi | 5 / 10 [0.500] | 0 / 1 [0.000] | 1 / 4 [0.250] | 8 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 11 | |
| Kim, Joe | 5 / 9 [0.556] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 10 | |
| Lam, Kenneth | 0 / 4 [0.000] | 0 / 3 [0.000] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |
| Lee, Mark | 5 / 11 [0.455] | 2 / 3 [0.667] | 1 / 3 [0.333] | 6 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 13 | |
| Wang, Eddie | 5 / 16 [0.313] | 2 / 9 [0.222] | 0 / 0 [0.000] | 7 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 12 | |
| 25 / 65 [0.385] | 5 / 21 [0.238] | 2 / 7 [0.286] | 43 | 14 | 6 | 1 | 17 | 19 | 57 | ||
| New York Fury - 70 | |||||||||||
| Player | FG | 3PT | FT | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO | F | PTS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chang, Rich | DNP | ||||||||||
| Choi, James | 7 / 16 [0.438] | 0 / 3 [0.000] | 2 / 2 [1.000] | 6 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 16 | |
| De Leon, Andrew | DNP | ||||||||||
| Hsieh, Ren | DNP | ||||||||||
| Kwok, Jason | DNP | ||||||||||
| Moy, Jeff | 5 / 16 [0.313] | 0 / 2 [0.000] | 5 / 8 [0.625] | 9 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 15 | |
| Parekh, Ram | DNP | ||||||||||
| Redhead, Roger | 5 / 15 [0.333] | 1 / 6 [0.167] | 0 / 2 [0.000] | 9 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 11 | |
| Stevens, Christian | DNP | ||||||||||
| Takenouchi, Banglee | 2 / 7 [0.286] | 1 / 2 [0.500] | 4 / 4 [1.000] | 6 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 9 | |
| Wang, Alvin | DNP | ||||||||||
| Youn, Chris | 7 / 12 [0.583] | 3 / 6 [0.500] | 2 / 4 [0.500] | 7 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 19 | |
| 26 / 66 [0.394] | 5 / 19 [0.263] | 13 / 20 [0.650] | 37 | 8 | 9 | 0 | 10 | 13 | 70 | ||
Referees
| William Bullock: | Rate Me |
| Lamont Long: | Rate Me |