Perez Zeledon 82 Sanatura Escazu 103

David Carnegie making it rain.

Perez Zeledon came in with its high octane offense, featuring three of the league's top scorers. Newest addition, Hernol Gardener, was rolling into our gym for the first time with sharpshooter Jackie Acuña and Thomas Douglas in tow. PZ is tied for fourth place and is in need of wins to tie up the last playoff slot.

The two teams were very even throughout the first half as Hernol scored from different spots. Our offense, again missing Alonso Sanchez, was generally effective and balanced, but we had a hard time stopping PZ's various weapons. We built small leads only to see PZ recover each time. Finally we got some stops to take a 5 point lead going into the half.

Grecia 59 Sanatura Escazu

Winless Grecia came into our gym without any pressure at all and scared the living hell out of us in the first half.  With starting point guard Aonso Sanchez out with an injury, Dwayne Grant saw extensive action since suffering a leg injury himself earlier in the month. The first half was marred by sloppy defense on our end coupled with Grecia player Vinicio Vargas hitting rainbow jumpers to keep the game close, giving us the slimmest of leads at halftime 39-38.

Dwayne Grant getting into the lane. 

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Barva 67 Sanatura Escazu 72

A week ago I was bitching about the refereeing in the San Ramon game. Today, I'm as quiet as a mouse. Did we get a favorable whistle on Tuesday night? Maybe....but I also think we got jobbed in the game at Barva. So I guess things even out in the long run, which doesn't make it right or fair.

Barva came into the game undefeated. They have more resources than any other team in the league: professional players, ample court time, weight gym, full coaching staff. They can easily outclass any organization. And then you factor in the tradition of winning titles, which they're anxious to recover. With all due respect to the other teams in our league, they have been the team to beat this year.

San Ramon 79 Sanatura Escazu 62

In the second game of the season, we were able to go to San Ramon and beat the defending national champion in surprising fashion. San Ramon more than returned the favor, applying a smackdown at home winning by a fairly large margin.

San Ramon sputtered through that first swing of the schedule, dropping three games and not playing high quality basketball despite having an impressive payroll (albeit with a key injury to Daniel Simmons). It's hard being the champ and getting everyone's best shot. The Christmas break was a welcome respite as San Ramon was able to work on their team and tweak their roste. They got rid of their American player, Carlos Jefferson who never seemed to fit in despite an impressive resume, and swapped him out for another American player Chris Giles.

  

The teams traded baskets early in the first quarter. Veteran Franklyn Ferguson was active early on for Barva. We were getting good looks at the baskets, but not quite converting all our opportunities around the basket. Our point guard, Alonso Sanchez, picked up his second foul bringing Dwayne Grant off the bench. Soon enough it was evident that Grant's leg injury against Limon was not fully healed, as he had  hard time accelerating and cutting.  The first quarter finished 21-14 as San Ramon went on a 8-2 run to break out a lead. 

In the second quarter newcomer Chris Giles knifed through our defense supplying some easy points, extending the San Ramon lead to 10. Diego Loria came off the bench to supply some instant offense with John Chappell and David Carnegie  crashing the boards, and we were able to go to the locker room at the half down by 4 on a big three pointer by Javier Bustamante.

San Ramon got a couple baskets early in the third quarter. Then they started a death march to the free throw lines, getting sent to the line on six straight possessions. We hung around keeping it a two possession game to close out the third quarter. In the fourth quarter our foul trouble kept getting worse as several of our players got to four fouls. After one particular dubious call, Sanchez got Ted up, letting San Ramon shoot four free throws to build an eleven point lead and never look back, eventually winning by 17.

Game Notes

• San Ramon shot 41 free throws, while we went to the line 20 times. Both teams shot very well, which is rare in our league.
• Diego Loria and Dave Millinier led our scoring with 14 points apiece. Chris Giles, in his second league game, scored 24 in a very efficient manner. I'm getting a deja vu all over again; last year San Ramon replaced Darrell St Rose (out with injury) with Greg Platter and it made an enormous difference in their season.
• I get very frustrated how they ref our center John Chappell in this league. Twice he got clean blocks and got called for fouls by a ref out of position. San Ramon's center, Jefeney Anderson, who is a very good defensive player in his own right, gets much more latitude with his contact. 

Limon 64 Sanatura Escazu 76

I can't express how much I dislike the change in schedule. In prior years, the season ran roughly from March til October. This year the Federation decided to move up the calendar. The first reason is to coincide with the FIBA international calendar. The second, and main reason, was that so the national team would be in fighting form for the Central American Games this coming March. On paper, both reasons make sense, but there was a huge problem in execution. To make that happen, they moved up this year's start four months which means we got a very short break between the last season and the current season.

The other big consequence is that we know have basketball games in December and January. Costa Rica shuts down from December 25th til mid January. Throughout December there are a bunch of office parties, family gatherings and Christmas shopping. Then most people take breaks to go to the beach or spend time with their families. Our league is not used to playing or practicing this time period, this being the first year it was hard to schedule practices and keep the team activ for the league's twoo week brea (in our case it as a little longer since we had our bye date coincide with the last weekend).
So after two weeks of uneven practce (and suspending for about ten days), we went into a game against Limon still shaking off our collective cobwebs. The first surprise of the game was that Limon was missing its post players: Hernol Gardener, Libert Cohen and Marlon Samuels. So our preparation for a post dominated team went out the window as we adjusted to lineups that basically didnt have a true post.

We jumped out to a big lead based on our fast break attack. Everyone got in on the scoring as we built a 16 point lead. Late in the second quarter, Harold Mitchell got hot for Limon, knocking down three 3 pointers and reducing our lead to a mere 4 points. We just didn't do a very good job of recognizing the hot hand in a four minute stretch where Mitchell caught fire.

In the second half we went back to our running game and made some defensive adjustments, expanding the lead to double digits. We then rotated our bench and gave everyone a chance to knock the cobwebs off their game, leading to an uneventful victory.

Game Notes

• David Carnegie had a strong second half, scoring 13 points and adding 11 rebounds to lead us in scoring and rebounds. We had several guys score more than ten points, as we did a pretty good job of spreading the wealth.
• Harold Mitchell ended up with 29 points for Limon. 
• One of the younger refs was at the game and it showed. Dave Millinier got mugged on repeated occasion without drawing the foul calls. A total of 27 fouls were called in the entire game, which is about 15 fouls less tahn the league average.
• Our three point was uncharacteristically bad in this game with Diego Loria hitting the only three pointer. We have been a pretty good shooting team but we were ice cold.