Jonas Emilsson
www.KramMag.com

The final score showed the Western Canada Redmen coming away with a 20-point victory, but the truth of the matter is they were mighty close to being upset by a pesky Bowness Trojans squad.

The Redmen, who trailed by as much as 19 points in the second quarter, overcame a dreadful first-half performance to secure a seemingly comfortable 90-70 victory.

But the win was anything but comfortable.

Francis Cormier scored a game-high 27 points for the Redmen and Eli Prochnau chipped in with 22 points, all of which came in the second half.

David Kaduhr led the Trojans with 15 points.

Action photos from this game will soon be available HERE.

The home-court loss will no doubt sting for the Trojans considering they dominated the provinces’ top-ranked senior boys team for two quarters, and hung with them for another quarter and a half before running out of steam in the final five minutes of the game.

“They out-competed us for the majority of the game,” said Redmen head coach Steve Wiebe.  “In terms of the score, we won.  In terms of who played better, they played a better game, there’s no question about that.”

The Redmen, who live and die by the outside shot, hit only one three-pointer in the first half, which came courtesy of Nebojsa Kuljic.

The Trojans, who enjoyed a considerable size advantage down low, held a 23-10 lead at the end of the first quarter.

“To their credit, their intensity and hustle got us out of our game,” said Wiebe.  They were very physical against us, and for some reason that took us out of our game.

The Trojans continued their impressive play through most of the second quarter, but in the final few minutes of the half hints of a momentum swing in the Redmen’s favour started to appear.

The difficult shots that were falling early and often for the Trojans suddenly began to miss, and the Redmen started to make some baskets courtesy of their speedy transition game which the Trojans had masterfully held in check up until this point.

By the time halftime came around the Redmen had managed to narrow the gap to a manageable 13-point deficit, well-within striking distance for their high-octane offense.

After trading buckets through the majority of the third quarter, the Redmen went on the kind of run fitting of a top-ranked team.

Trailing 47-36 with 5:50 to play in the quarter, the Redmen took complete charge of the game, eventually taking their first lead at the 8:55 mark of the fourth quarter on a nifty runner by Cormier.

As poorly as they had played up until this point, the Redmen also demonstrated how quickly they’re able to put points on the board when they’re on their game.

“Good shooting and good players won that game for us, not good play,” said Wiebe.

By the time everything was said and done, they had completed a 39-point turnaround on the scoreboard, impressive to pretty much everyone but the coaching staff, who will no doubt be fretting over how their team could fall behind by that many points.

“We got the outcome we wanted, but it’s definitely not how we wanted to do it” said Prochnau.  “We learned that we have to play four quarters of basketball now matter who we’re playing.”