Milo U15 Youth Cup Results

Gryphons 39-30 Bedok View Secondary School

This match was played without Coach, as he was away in China for a business trip, and so we were coached by Liu Dong. Milo Cup has a rule that says that only 6 players can play in the 1st quarter, and a different 6 in the 2nd quarter, so this is very much like primary school basketball, where each player can only play a max of 3 quarters. We started this match brilliantly, pressing hard, grabbing rebounds, and attacking well. Our defense worked for us in the 1st quarter, and we limited them to only 3 points while scoring 13. The 2nd and 3rd quarters were horrible. We failed to convert our underbaskets or layups, our defense was leaking horribly, and we just played badly. We combined for a total of 5 points in the 2 quarters, while allowing them to score 19. At the start of the 3rd quarter, we were down 22-18. In the last quarter, we cam back hard. This time around, we defended and gave it our best shot because we didn't want to open our campaign with a loss. We fought hard, went for all the loose balls, and shot well. In that quarter we outscored Bedok View 21-8, and finished the match 39-30

Gryphons 32-49 T-Net @ Bukit Merah

This was a tough match, and the score was close primarily because the other team played their 2nd team for most of the match. It was a disappointing game, we tried our best but we were never close. We allowed them to drive to the basket too easily, and our rebounds were nearly non-existent. We also found out that Milo Cup does not allow the teams to play a zone press, which meant that our defense was 'disallowed'. We were outplayed by the other team.

Gryphons 77-34 Clementi Town

We played very well for the first half of this match. We rebounded hard in the first half, and defended well as a team. After several reminders, we finally got the weak side defense going in the first half, and also fought hard for the rebounds. We cleared up the boards, preventing the other team from getting easy put-backs, and also starting fast-breaks for our team. It worked extremely well for us in the 1st and 2nd quarter, where we outscored the opponents 22-6 and 21-2 respectively. In the 2nd half, things changed, as we wanted to get more steals, and started to do our own individual things instead of playing as a team. We didn't rebound as a team anymore, allowing for them to grab more defensive and offensive rebounds. We were also unable to break their full-court press. In the fourth quarter, we tried to outscore them, instead of focusing our efforts on defense. We also missed many underbaskets in the last quarter. However, we still managed to pull off a victory, mostly due to the good defense and rebounding that we had in the first half.

Gryphons 48-34 AMK CC
This was a match whereby we allowed to other team to score way too many 3 pointers. We failed to work as a team to defend the three pointers, allowing the team to hit 5 throughout the match. What was disappointing was that many of these 3s were from the top of the key or just 1 pass away, and yet we failed to stop them. We managed to run our plays that we had practised, but only once or twice. We never really pulled away in this match, but it was great that we managed to pull through for a win that'll take us to the next round.