On Saturday evening, the two teams tied at the 4th position in the standings faced off in Leppävaara. It was an anticipated match between Aalto-Basket and JaKaRi in which the locals wanted to seek revenge for the close loss they found on their visit to Järvenpää in October.

The tekkarit walked on the court with the clear goal of winning the game from the warm-up. During the first quarter, they still had the vivid images of the last minutes in Järvenpää in mind, which was the fuel they needed to play some solid and mature basketball. So resolute were the local players that the scoreboard showed 29-9 in the last minutes of the first interval.

The second quarter started with the visiting team pushing harder — they realised they had to start changing the dynamic if they wanted to have a shot at walking out with the W. In that period, an exchange of baskets led to a slight cut on the margin, but the locals were still leading by 13 at the half.

At the restart after the halftime, JaKaRi came up with a new strategy to slow down the guys in white: zone defense. Little did they know that the splash brothers Oskari & Oscar were ready to make them regret that decision — they combined for 9 three-pointers and many more tears from their opponents. Inexplicably, as if infected by a shooting mania, the visiting team started replying to each of the AB’s threes with threes of their own. The show went on for the whole 3rd quarter, in which the two teams combined for a grand total of 11 threes! — 27 in the whole game.

The last quarter went on smoothly and the difference on the scoreboard did not go under 20 at any point. The tekkarit ended the game with a season-high 106 points against a tough opponent hoping that it will hype them up to face the undefeated ToPoLa next week.

Besides the AB splash brothers’ shooting clinic, one should also mention the all-around offensive performance by Matti and the great rebounding night —especially offensively— that the big fellas Akseli and Marcus had.