B Division South Zone Round 1 Game 2: Raffles Institution vs Bukit Merah Secondary (85-19)

Raffles Institution vs Bukit Merah Secondary (85-19)


Points by Quarter:


                                     1st-------2nd-------3rd-------4th
Raffles Institution--------17--------15--------27-------26
Bukit Merah--------------3---------5---------2--------9


In the second game of the first round, we faced a familiar foe in Bukit Merah Secondary. We have faced each other in the first round of the zonals for 3 straight years. Although we had won previous meetings, we were reminded not to be complacent and continue to go out strong and play hard defense.

The first quarter began with a bucket scored on the very first possession by us. Our offense was very smooth as we could constantly get inside the paint for easy layups, taking advantage of our height against the shorter players from the opposing team. This saw us jump out to an early lead, as we ended the first up 17-3. The second half was more of the same as we constantly attacked the paint while forcing Bukit Merah to shoot outside jump shots. At the half, the score was 32-8.

The 3rd quarter was the most well played in this game as we managed to score 27 points while only allowing them to score 2 points on us. This was mostly due to our full court pressure defense as we managed to get tons of steals in the front court, converting them to layups immediately after the steal. Our center Danny played a huge role in this 27-2 run as he single handedly racked up 10 steals by himself in the whole game, to go along with his 11 points. Most of his steals came in this 3rd quarter, as it seemed like as long as he raised up his long arms, he would get his hand on the ball and get the steal.

Shao Jie and Jovi were dominant on the glass in this game as they managed to grab 10 rebounds and 9 rebounds respectively. Whats more is that they had a total of 17 offensive rebounds out of the 19 rebounds that they grabbed. (9 Shao Jie, 8 Jovi). We need to keep this aggressiveness up.



Improvements

We need to make sure we capitalise on every layup that we take as we cannot afford to keep missing open looks under the basket against stronger teams. In this game, due to our height advantage, we were able to grab the offensive rebound even after we missed the layup until we eventually scored. This would definitely be hard against stronger teams with inside presence.



Strengths

We did a great job on the free throw line in this game, largely thanks to Shao Jie as he was a stellar 9/11 from the free throw line as he was always aggressive, drawing fouls on the Bukit Merah players. This resulted in 2 of the Bukit Merah players fouling out eventually. But as a whole, we still did well from the line as we were 14/19 as a team. We need to keep this up

We kept the turnovers in this game way down to only 9, while also racking up a total of 38 steals, the highest we have gotten through all the games we had played so far. Although this will most likely not recur against better teams, we need to constantly be alert in intercepting passes from our opponents.



We will be playing NJC in the third game of the 1st round, followed by Catholic High in the finale. Stay tuned!