Jonas Emilsson
www.KramMag.com

Does everything really always happen in threes?

Probably not, but the old saying turned out to be true for the third installment of Redmen versus Ghosts battle this season.

To make things more interesting, each time the two teams squared off the game took place on the biggest of basketball stages as far as Calgary high school hoops is concerned.

First up, the final of the massive Calgary Basketball Classic pre-season tournament, which the Redmen won 96-50.

Next, a meeting in the division one championship final, which the Redmen won with a commanding 106-71 score.

The third and final meeting took place this Saturday in the 4A provincial championship game at the University of Lethbridge, and again the Redmen came away with a wide margin of victory to add to their seasons’ impressive haul of championship hardware.

This time the Redmen won 89-69.

Nebojsa Kuljic scored a game-high 21 points and Francis Cormier and Eli Prochnau scored 20 and 19 points respectively.

Josh Daniel and Eddie Asamoah each scored 16 points to lead the Ghost’s attack.

Despite the disparity on the score sheet in all three games, Redmen’s head coach Steve Wiebe wasn’t taking any chances in the latter stages of Saturday night’s game, despite his team leading by more than 20 points.

In fact, the coach may have saved some of his more intense coaching opportunities for the game’s final stages, frequently yelling instructions to his players on the court, and on a few occasion, even pulling some of his veteran guys off the court for some one-on-one instructions.

But the purpose wasn’t to try and run up the score.

After watching the Ghosts upset the No. 1 ranked Raymond Comets and then pulling off a miracle late-game victory over the Jasper Place Rebels in the tournament’s semi-final, Wiebe wasn’t taking any chances.

”You know what?“ started Wiebe. “I saw that game against Jasper Place the other day, and I didn’t know how many miracles they had left. I was trying to make sure that it didn’t happen today. I wanted to coach them right to the end because that’s the way they played and I think Gradin is a good enough team that they deserved that.”

Cormier echoed his coaches thoughts about respecting what the Ghosts are capable of.
“I was getting nervous because they took down Raymond, which was the No. 1 team,” said the grad-12 guard. “I had the jitters before the game, and I was thinking what if we’re another Raymond, what if they beat us? Thankfully they didn’t.”

Both teams started tentatively in the opening quarter, with each team struggling to put points on the board.

Considering the two teams’ previous history, the tentative start definitely wasn’t a feeling out process, it was most likely caused from nerves from playing in a game of such magnitude.

By the time the first quarter ended, the Redmen held an 18-11 lead.

But the Redmen started to find their groove in the second quarter, and surprisingly, it wasn’t triggered by their usual barrage of three-pointers.

Instead, they found success getting the ball into the paint and settling for layups and short jumpers.

“After our last two wins I knew that Grandin wasn’t going to let us take shots from the outside,“ explained Wiebe. “We said before hand that we’ve beat them twice before from the outside, so they’re going to contest and pressure, so we tried to get back-door cuts on them and get to the glass. It’s nice that we could show a little different side than just the three.”

When the halftime break rolled around the Redmen had extended their lead to 43-25.

“We just pressured them and got some crucial turnovers and we built on that,” said Cormier.

In the third quarter, the Redmen spread out the offense to add a few extra long-range jumpers to the mix, including a pair o back-to-back threes in the final seconds of the quarter to give them a 67-47 lead.

The Ghosts never stopped trying in the final quarter, but the deficit was too large to assume another late-game miracle was a possibility.

Instead, the Cinderalla run came to an end for the Ghosts. But as bad as they most-likely felt after the game, they should take pride in the fact that nobody outside of their team expected them to perform as well as they did considering they entered the tournament as the No. 8 seed.

“All credit to Grandin,” said Wiebe. “They’re a gracious team, they’re a hard working team, a skilled team and thankfully for us we came out on top. We just made a few more shots from the outside.”

As for the Redmen, the win puts the cap on a successful season that in some ways they started building towards last season.

“These guys have come together all year,” said Wiebe. “They’re the most cohesive team I’ve ever had and it showed on the floor and it showed in the results, I couldn’t be prouder of these guys.”

Another word for cohesiveness is chemistry, which is a critical ingredient for any championship caliber team.

“We’re like a brotherhood,” added Cormier. “As cheesy as that is, it’s a family here and we all play off of each other’s successes. When one player gets hot, the whole team gets hot, and it’s hard to lose with that. Our team has tremendous chemistry.”