This weekend Aalto-Basket faced off against Topola, who are top of the M2D table and still undefeated this season. After an impressive win last week against Jakari, AB confidence was high. We also realized Aalto-Basket had never beaten Topola. The last win was when the the team still had it’s old name PUS-Basket, so this was a chance to make history as someone said before the game.

Despite these juicy circumstances, there is only one phrase that can describe AB during the first 7 minutes of the game ”Ice cold”. Teekkarit were able to create good shots behind the arc and inside the paint but couldn’t hit literally anything. The first basket came a bit before 3 minutes was left in the clock. Topola was not that unlucky and the lead was at worst 20-0, before AB made its first basket. Teekkarit found a bit of rhythm at the end of the quarter so the first quarter ended 26-12.

Second quarter wasn’t any better despite AB’s effort to cut the deficit. The games against Topola are always physical and especially today, when the referees whistle was clearly not in the favor of AB, frustrations were beginning to show on the court. Both teams were complaining a lot to the refs but only AB was punished. Two techs for AB inside couple of minutes and none to Topola told the story of the second quarter. Halftime score was 48-28.

Before the second half, teekkarit decided to stop complaining and show some pride. And the second half was much better, despite more missed calls by the refs. The defence was more aggressive and pushing the pace on offence resulted into good things. AB was able to cut the lead to 10 a couple of times during the half, but they couldn’t get any closer than that. Both times Topola made couple of timely shots to cut AB’s momentum. Final score 84-69 (nice).

All in all it was a dissapointing day for Aalto-Basket. Basically AB couldn’t recover from the horrific 20-0 start and the whole match left a bitter taste in the mouth. Second half was still somewhat positive as teekkarit didn’t absolutely give up and tried to fight back into the game. The next game is against Sykki and hopefully teekkarit can bring the second half physicality of this game to the next. David and Oscar can both also add techs to their resume even though everybody can agree that they might not have been deserved. I mean, if those two got techs, then there should have been at least two or three more to both teams from the amount of complaining all around.