| Zilzal overcomes slow start and moves onto Final Four |
Jan 23, 2006 |
These teams met in Week One and saw Zilzal win 39-27 as Bayyina found themselves outgunned. Times have changed as Zilzal finished as the second seed in their division but has not been dominant, while Bayyina took advantage of the great play of Jamshaid Hashmi to win games. It would be interesting to see how Bayyina would react after the near upset loss to Kafirun in the first round of the playoffs.
The game started with Bayyina showed that they were going to try and out-gun Zilzal as Taha Mubashar was shooting at will. Zilzal did not make any adjustments defensively to try and contain Mubashar who clearly had the hot hand as he was scoring at will. Mubashar scored his teams first 16 points to start the game and drained four three pointers in the first half. When the first half ended, it was Bayyina leading by a score of 26-23. Mubashar scored 21 of his teams 26 points in the half while Zilzal got 15 points out of Ammer Askary.
The second half saw Askary take control on both ends of the court as he shut down Mubashar on defense and started to hit shots from all over on offence. Zilzal quickly overcame the Bayyina lead and built a big lead of their own, forcing Bayyina to call a timeout with 4:24 left and Zilzal leading 49-38. Bayyina managed to shut Zilzal down for the remainder of the game as Zilzal did not score a point, but Bayyina was unable to get much offensively and the game ended with Zilzal winning 49-42.
Zilzal was led by Askary with 32 points while Anish Bhalla finished with 15 points. Bayyina was led by Mubashar who finished with 23 points but was held to only 2 points in the second half. Hashmi finished with 5 points and 14 rebounds while playing with a leg injury.
Zilzal will move onto the Final Four and play Nas. Nas won the regular season match-up between the teams by a score of 55-49 but Askary did not play in that game. |
